Fans pick 67 books like The Bold Dry Garden

We love a garden book that works hard as a guide, and this book does just that!

It’s a handbook that feels like a trusted magazine with real-life garden tours and lifestyle tips such as “Steal This Look” (our fave!) for everything from stone and ironwork to plants and water features. We couldn’t appreciate more the way an author can break down a garden’s style and feel and help us replicate that look we love at home.

Gardenista is a go-to when we want a design refresh!

As plant lovers who live in Santa Barbara, where succulents and aloes are ever-present, we love this book as it feels like a big authority on such a specific subject.

The book offers a crash course in choosing and planning succulents, and reading it makes even a novice feel like an expert. In addition to learning plant names and growing tips, Baldwin offers fun ideas like covering the top of a henhouse with low-maintenance plants.

Plus, the book is bursting with color, so every page is a visual thrill.

It’s hard to find a good garden book that’s useful and yet gorgeous enough to keep on the coffee table. We found these two to be wildly true in The Art of Outdoor Living, which is stunning and aspirational, with full-page photos of outdoor spaces that have a dream-like quality.

We want to step into many of the book’s vignettes, from gravel courtyards to cozy fireplace pits to patios designed to perfection. Best of all, there are high to low tips, so while it reads aspirational, it also has an approachable quality to it, which makes us want to curl up with a cup of coffee by the outdoor fire pit we’re now suddenly dreaming up!

As longtime lovers of Lotusland, one of the country’s most stunning gardens that happens to be located in our own backyard, we love seeing its corners brought to life in this gorgeous book. Most of all, we love the stunning photography here by the talented Lisa Romerein, who magically captured this enchanted place we call Eden.

While we always look for written guides and tips when it comes to garden inspiration, this book pulls you in for its beauty, and it is impossible not to get transported in the pages.

Woollett’s novel is based on much research on Peoples Temple and Jonestown. She came to the US from Australia for interviews with many survivors and others—including Ron Cabral and me because of our knowledge of the teenagers in the Temple. It’s a great read and adds much to the understanding of those who joined the Temple. Evelyn Lyndon (all the characters have fictional names except Jim Jones) is the “Beautiful Revolutionary” who, with her idealistic husband, joins the Temple and eventually becomes one of Jones’s mistresses. I recognize many of the book’s characters, sometimes two people rolled into one. Only in a novel could Woollett be in the minds of the characters she follows in this story, who are all believable and vividly drawn.

An introductory chapter describes our greater Bay Area climate and its microclimates. The plants listed are ones that will thrive in the region with a minimum of summer water. The glory of the book is in the photographs by Saxon Holt, which include close shots for identification and wider shots that will inspire you to combine plants handsomely in your garden. 

My copies of this series are so worn by reading and re-reading that they are falling apart. There’s no higher praise from me as a reader. 

This is my comfort read, which is odd because it’s about the fall of a civilization—and The Dark, in particular, is terrifying. We never really see them. That’s partly because they aren’t entirely corporeal and can change size and shape at will. It’s also because anyone we know in the story who encounters them is almost certainly fighting for their life.

Are The Dark one character or many? Certainly, what one of them knows, they all know. The key to this conundrum is what motivates them to do as they do, and alien as they are; their motivations are as unexpected as they are profound. 

This is beautifully written classic fantasy in all its glory. If you only read one book of these five,… show more.

In this book are directions for planting and pruning roses and protecting them from pests, all keyed to the climate of the greater Bay Area. The separate chapter on rose-growing in the fog will be especially welcomed by coast-side gardeners, as will the list of rose varieties rated for the SF Bay Area. Order the book's current edition on the San Francisco Rose Society website using the direct link below. 

This was a hard pick because I could easily have chosen any of Joanne Bischof’s other books.

She writes with such excellence and depth of feeling that you bond with the characters and go through their trials alongside them. I chose The Gold in These Hills over her other equally loved books because I read it with tears streaming down my face. The theme of restoration after loss and betrayal resonated with me. Deep despair gives way to soul-stretching hope.

Beautiful, quotable prose stuck with me long after I finished. If you want a novel about second chances that speaks deeply to the heart, give this one a try.  

Mitali Perkins is a winsome, thoughtful writer who easily draws the reader into her discussions of the timelessness of each classic book. This book is a blend of memoir, literary criticism, and moral formation. My favorite part of Steeped in Stories was her contagious love for each book. She reminded me why I loved them, and why I wanted my children to read them when they were younger. Not only does Mitali guide the reader through what makes these books classics in a good sense, she also helps us see them with discerning eyes so that instead of ditching old books for problematic parts, she helps us navigate them with young readers in mind. Steeped in Stories discusses The Hobbit, Heidi, Emily of Deep Valley, Little Women, and The Silver Chair.