100 books like The Edible Landscape

After a long day spent digging in the dirt, I like to treat myself by going to bed early to read Diane Ackerman’s Cultivating Delight.

Ackerman is known for going deep on the topics of the five senses, love, and, in this case, her garden, through the seasons.

With meandering musings about what’s growing in her backyard and meditations on the everyday tasks involved in maintaining her plot, Ackerman transports me to a lush, verdant place, providing just the rejuvenation I need to return to my garden the next day.

Every spring, I pull this book from my shelf before heading over to the garden center or farmer’s market to pick out plantings for my window boxes.

I use the ideas in this book as a launch pad.

Sometimes I try to replicate exactly what appears in a window box design that catches my eye, but more often I just crib off a color scheme or copy the rhythm of showy flowered varieties paired with pretty leafy trailers.

I especially love that this book provides ideas for all seasons. 

Tasha Tudor, the original cottagecore icon, is the one of the first people I was inspired by to change my outlook on life and be brave enough to include elements of a historically inspired style into my life. I absolutely love this book for its romantic imagery and magical ideas for building a fairytale garden and home.

This book has inspired me again and again, especially to learn to embrace my own personal style and that it’s okay to be a bit odd. This book not only has beautiful photos, but it also shares practical tips and ideas for growing your own cozy cottage garden.

With each page, you enter Tasha’s nineteenth-century-inspired world that she built and feel the confidence to build your own version of a romantic cottage life.

This book was crucial in my path to veganism.

It is a memoir where Barbara Kingsolver writes humorously about a year of living off the land. She is not a vegetarian but must raise, kill, and butcher animals if she wants to eat meat. The result is, every time she eats meat, she weighs the emotional cost.

This reckoning has been my bible. I ask myself, would I be willing to kill the chick I raised to eat? Inevitably, the answer is “no.” 

The book is not a treaty encouraging people to live off the land, it’s the opposite. It makes you appreciate every bit of food you put in your mouth and the fact you did not have to grow, harvest, clean and cook it. 

Blending Thomsen’s signature humor with her rockin’ expertise, Kiss My Aster is the book you give to your cool friend who just moved into a house with a yard. This raucously illustrated guide gets into the soup-to-nuts of designing a garden — from the different types of soil and drainage essentials to the best vines to plant to why you might need a Japanese maple. (“Or six.”) Learn how to handle pests, and see what Thomsen wears when she’s weeding and deadheading versus when she’s demolishing, digging, and planting. Designwise, the book shows you irreverent ways to play with tall plants, textured foliage, and one-off “specimen plants.” It’s also opinionated — guiding you to a more sustainable gardening life and away from tired lava rocks. 

The author, who was for many years an extension urban horticulturist and associate professor at Puyallup Research and Extension Center, Washington State University, does gardeners a great service by taking on common garden myths about fertilizer, mulch, transplanting, staking, compost tea, watering and many more potentially confusing topics. In this and her subsequent books, she skillfully debunks myths with current research and her professional experience.

Rosalind Creasy is one of my heroes. It was she who first turned me on to heirloom fruits and vegetables over 30 years ago, when I read her newly published Cooking from the Garden. That seminal tome celebrates the food garden’s bounty and uses in cookery. 

Creasy is best known as a pioneer in the field of edible landscaping aka foodscaping: the practice of integrating edible plants into the landscape for beauty and sustenance. Think yummy delicious arbors, allées, groundcovers, borders, hedges, espaliers, foundation plantings, and potted plants. She spells out all the how-to’s, wheres, and whyfors in her first book, The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping; and updates it all in the second edition, Edible Landscaping. If you’re looking for practical advice, detailed instructions, design schemes, and recommended plants to feed body and soul, then allow me to point you in Ros’s direction.

Well, thank god this book exists. It fills a huge gap—Joseph Paxton, an English architect, gardener, and engineer, as well as a lover of orchids—was everywhere, doing everything, in the 19th century United Kingdom! He built London’s Crystal Palace (cementing it as the first and possibly most grand World’s Fair in history) as well as directed all activities at Chatsworth (home to one of the world’s largest orchid collections in its time). The book shows us once again that the rich and powerful were not in complete control of the subtropical orchid trade—it took visionaries like Paxton to make them grow successfully in cold locations. I loved getting to know Paxton, his environs, and his relationships with all the well-known horticulturists and botanists of his age.

Not only does this book provide a translation of a nearly 1,000-year-old text on garden design – the oldest such text existing in the world, but it also includes extensive annotation and a carefully researched introduction to the cultural and historic influences on the development of Japanese gardens. This is a delightful combination of the technical detail and practical advice of the classic text with the author-translators’ descriptive explanation.

Brand starts off by exploring structure in architecture. Not only does he identify the six key structures in buildings, but he tells us how rapidly they change.

Never have I met or heard of a software architect who could predict for me how rapidly the structures that he/she uses to design and build his/her system will change. (Many can't even identify what the key structures in their systems are).

Brand then gives us lessons in what kinds of buildings undergo what kinds of changes, and how to build in a way that encourages or discourages change. He shows how owners modify their buildings over time, and how buildings evolve as they pass from one owner to another.

Structure, designing for change, and understanding the possible evolutionary paths that your construct may take are all topics that should intensely interest software engineers.