Love The Gardener's Year? Readers share 100 books like The Gardener's Year...

By Karel Capek, Josef Capek,

Here are 100 books that The Gardener's Year fans have personally recommended if you like The Gardener's Year. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Orchard: A Memoir

Deirdre Heekin Author Of An Unlikely Vineyard: The Education of a Farmer and Her Quest for Terroir

From my list on wine, love, and landscape.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a winegrower, farmer, writer, photographer, and pop-upeuse. I fell in love with food and wine while living and working in Italy, then returned stateside to create an homage to the people and place that embraced us and taught us so much. That endeavor--the restaurant osteria pane e salute opened with my chef husband Caleb Barber—was where I curated the wine program and became passionate about wines farmed artfully. I began working as a winegrower in 2007, a personal landscape experiment that led me down the rabbit hole of growing and making wine from hybrid varieties focused on regenerative viticulture and low intervention winemaking.

Deirdre's book list on wine, love, and landscape

Deirdre Heekin Why did Deirdre love this book?

The Orchard is a mesmerizing story of one woman’s efforts to save her family farm in Depression-era Massachusetts. It is a glimmering and moving memoir of “Kitty” Robertson’s determination to save the small orchard she inherited from her father, the last thing that linked her family to their history. It is a story of struggle and determination, and she is a heroine who didn’t receive medals or accolades or fortune for accepting the bone-cold physical labor in winters, inherited debt, broken dreams. Somehow she is able to still see the beauty in the grit of farm life in a grim period, spring blossoms in the orchard, the green of summer, the kindness of neighbors as they help each other through challenge after challenge.

In the end, it is a narrative of redemption and victory and reminds me that the life of farming and writing is hard scrapple, but it is…

By Adele Crockett Robertson,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Orchard as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Orchard is an exquisitely beautiful and poignant memoir of a young woman's single-handed struggle to save her New England farm in the depths of the Great Depression. Recently discovered by the author's daughter, it tells the story of Adele "Kitty" Robertson, young and energetic, but unprepared by her Radcliffe education for the rigors of apple farming in those bitter times. Alone at the end of a country road, with only a Great Dane for company, plagued by debts, broken machinery, and killing frosts, Kitty revives the old orchard after years of neglect. Every day is a struggle, but every…


Book cover of The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants

William Alexander Author Of The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for a Perfect Garden

From my list on a gardening life.

Why am I passionate about this?

William Alexander’s best-selling gardening memoir, The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for a Perfect Garden has been praised for its fresh, humorous, and honest take on home gardening. The books he’s selected similarly break the mould for garden books, featuring rabid rose gardeners, an obsessive breeder, and a Czech playwright.

William's book list on a gardening life

William Alexander Why did William love this book?

Gardening, whether in a backyard or a hundred-acre orchard, is an audacious attempt to improve on nature, and Smith’s fascinating hybrid of biography, history, and botany brings to life the most audacious of them all. The only biography on my list, I’ve included it because, in an age where we might be forgiven for thinking it takes millions of corporate dollars and genetic engineers to produce a new plant, The Garden of Invention reminds us how one man’s singular determination, patience, and brilliance can change the world. And produce the perfect potato for McDonald’s French fries.

By Jane S. Smith,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Garden of Invention as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The wide-ranging and delightful history of celebrated plant breeder Luther Burbank and the business of farm and garden in early twentieth- century America

At no other time in history has there been more curiosity or concern about the food we eat-and genetically modified foods, in particular, have become both pervasive and suspect. A century ago, however, Luther Burbank's blight-resistant potatoes, white blackberries, and plumcots-a plum-apricot hybrid-were celebrated as triumphs in the best tradition of American ingenuity and perseverance. In his experimental grounds in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank bred and cross-bred edible and ornamental plants-for both home gardens and commercial farms-until…


Book cover of Otherwise Normal People: Inside the Thorny World of Competitive Rose Gardening

William Alexander Author Of The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for a Perfect Garden

From my list on a gardening life.

Why am I passionate about this?

William Alexander’s best-selling gardening memoir, The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for a Perfect Garden has been praised for its fresh, humorous, and honest take on home gardening. The books he’s selected similarly break the mould for garden books, featuring rabid rose gardeners, an obsessive breeder, and a Czech playwright.

William's book list on a gardening life

William Alexander Why did William love this book?

Q-tips, cotton balls, and hazmat suits: welcome to the world of competitive rose gardening. Scott’s engaging journey into the underbelly of rose exhibitions will leave you wondering, Are these hobbyists bloomin’ nuts, or simply having more fun than the rest of us? My dark-horse pick, maybe because it reassured me that my own gardening exploits (installing a 10,000-volt electric fence that deters people but not groundhogs, for instance) weren’t so wacky, after all.

By Aurelia C. Scott,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Otherwise Normal People as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Twice a year America's rose lovers cut the prettiest blossoms off their best plants and travel to the national rose show, where they lovingly groom their precious blooms for hours in a frigid hall in order to contend for the highest honor: the Queen of Show. Doctors. Teachers. Sheet metal mechanics. Lawyers. Truck drivers. Men and women. These are type A gardeners, and for them this is a blood sport. They grow tender roses in the frigid North and disease prone roses in the humid South simply for the challenge. They decorate otherwise lovely yards with paper bags and panty…


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Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

Book cover of Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

Jenny Price Author Of Stop Saving the Planet!: An Environmentalist Manifesto

From my list on revolutionize how Americans think about nature.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a writer, artist, and historian, and I’ve spent much of my career trying to blow up the powerful American definition of environment as a non-human world “out there”, and to ask how it’s allowed environmentalists, Exxon, and the EPA alike to refuse to take responsibility for how we inhabit environments. Along the way, I’ve written Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America and "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA"; co-founded the LA Urban Rangers public art collective; and co-created the “Our Malibu Beaches” phone app. I currently live in St. Louis, where I’m a Research Fellow at the Sam Fox School at Washington University-St. Louis. 

Jenny's book list on revolutionize how Americans think about nature

Jenny Price Why did Jenny love this book?

A self-critical and often hysterically funny account of what happens when you plant a garden to be “one with nature” and nature has other ideas. Still my favorite Pollan book (his first!), which is saying a lot. Favorite bit: his journey from “living in harmony” with a resident groundhog to an albeit ill-considered act of firebombing.

By Michael Pollan,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Second Nature as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An account of one man's experience in his garden.


Book cover of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

Paolo Squatriti Author Of Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750-900

From my list on how plants make human history happen.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an early medieval European historian who, in the last decades, branched out into environmental history. Having grown up in semi-rustic conditions, I have always been curious about rural things and past agricultural practices. I watch carefully as plows slice through fields, mind how birds and bees weave together their ecosystems, and pay attention to the phases by which trees put on and take off their leaves. Now a professional historian, my job involves reading a lot of rural and environmental history, so I have developed a good sense of books that mix academic rigor and approachability.

Paolo's book list on how plants make human history happen

Paolo Squatriti Why did Paolo love this book?

“The face that launched a thousand ships,” as Homer would say. Pollan’s witty and well-written treatment of how plants think and act to modulate their environments inspired 21st-century “critical plant studies” in the Anglophone world, including mine.

The book starts you thinking about the thousands of ways plants elbow into your world and how much they matter to your existence on earth, in economic but also spiritual senses. You end up agape in wonder.

By Michael Pollan,

Why should I read it?

9 authors picked The Botany of Desire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A farmer cultivates genetically modified potatoes so that a customer at McDonald's half a world away can enjoy a long, golden french fry. A gardener plants tulip bulbs in the autumn and in the spring has a riotous patch of colour to admire. Two simple examples of how humans act on nature to get what we want. Or are they? What if those potatoes and tulips have evolved to gratify certain human desires so that humans will help them multiply? What if, in other words, these plants are using us just as we use them? In blending history, memoir and…


Book cover of The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit

Marc Millon Author Of Italy in a Wineglass: The Taste of History

From my list on food and wine that take you places and allow you to travel in time.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been researching and writing about wine, food, and travel for over 40 years (my first book, The Wine and Food of Europe, co-authored with my photographer wife Kim Millon, was published in 1982). I love to travel, I love to eat, and I love to drink wine. Most of all, I am interested in placing food and wine within a cultural and historical context. I have a weekly podcast, “Wine, Food, and Travel with Marc Millon,” which allows me to explore these topics by speaking directly to people. I hope you enjoy the books on my list as much as I do.

Marc's book list on food and wine that take you places and allow you to travel in time

Marc Millon Why did Marc love this book?

I could almost immediately smell the gorgeous scent of citrus wafting from the pages of this beautiful book through the magic of Helena Atlee’s precisely detailed writing.

Who would have thought that the story of Italy’s varied and numerous citrus plantations would take me on a journey all across the country, from Sicily’s west coast to the fragrant lemon gardens of Lake Garda, and in time from when the Arabs introduced bitter oranges up to the workings of the citrus industry today.

I love this book because it simply tells the fragrant story of how fruit, in various manifestations, has come to be cultivated all around the country and to represent something of the soul and the spirit of the Italian people.

By Helena Attlee,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked The Land Where Lemons Grow as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Land Where Lemons Grow is the sweeping story of Italy's cultural history told through the history of its citrus crops. From the early migration of citrus from the foothills of the Himalayas to Italy's shores to the persistent role of unique crops such as bergamot (and its place in the perfume and cosmetics industries) and the vital role played by Calabria's unique Diamante citrons in the Jewish celebration of Sukkoth, author Helena Attlee brings the fascinating history and its gustatory delights to life.

Whether the Battle of Oranges in Ivrea, the gardens of Tuscany, or the story of the…


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Book cover of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier,

The coaching book that's for all of us, not just coaches.

It's the best-selling book on coaching this century, with 15k+ online reviews. BrenĂŠ Brown calls it "a classic". Dan Pink said it was "essential".

It is practical, funny, and short, and "unweirds" coaching. Whether you're a parent, a teacher,…

Book cover of Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

Ngoc Minh Ngo Author Of In Bloom: Creating and Living With Flowers

From my list on why everyone loves gardening.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a photographer of gardens and botanical still-lifes. I have a passion for plants and flowers and love reading about their historical and cultural significance. I am always curious about the meanings that humankind has ascribed to flowers in different cultures and eras. I have written and photographed three books that revolve around my passion for flowers.

Ngoc's book list on why everyone loves gardening

Ngoc Minh Ngo Why did Ngoc love this book?

This is a book that I have read and reread several times. The author is not a garden writer but a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, and Gardens is a unique work in garden literature. Harrison’s essay – erudite, thoughtful, and fascinating – examines the urge to garden throughout history. The book takes you on a journey to all gardens – real and imagined – from the Garden of Eden to the Garden School of Epicurus and the homeless gardens in New York City, to Versailles and the Paradise gardens of Islam. With its wide-ranging topics and cultural references, the book invites repeated readings, especially when I want to think more deeply about what gardening reveals about our human condition.

By Robert Pogue Harrison,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Gardens as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. With "Gardens", Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, "Gardens" is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison's…


Book cover of Orwell's Roses

Theresa Kishkan Author Of Mnemonic: A Book of Trees

From my list on plants and how our lives are woven with theirs.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in a coastal landscape and aspired from childhood to read my way through it by knowing its plants. I once watched a master carver at work on a totem pole at a living museum and could relate the wood curls falling from his adze to the giant cedars growing at the site. As a university student, I worked in a botanical show garden, learning so much about the provenance of plants and what they tell us about geography, history, and beauty. These experiences, in childhood and early adulthood, formed my lifelong interest in ethnobotany, nomenclature, and mythology, explored through the lens of creative work.

Theresa's book list on plants and how our lives are woven with theirs

Theresa Kishkan Why did Theresa love this book?

As an avid reader of biography, I was thrilled to discover this brilliant saga of George Orwell’s life as a journalist and activist and the rose bushes he purchased from Woolworths and planted in 1936 in an English garden.

The roses are a tangible presence in his participation in the Spanish Civil War and his support for women’s suffrage, universal justice, and human rights. I deeply admire how Solnit follows Orwell’s influence as a gardener and a humanist through a world hungry for his integrity and clarity of thought.

By Rebecca Solnit,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Orwell's Roses as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'I loved this book... An exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times' Margaret Atwood

'Expansive and thought-provoking' Independent

Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening - George Orwell

Inspired by her encounter with the surviving roses that Orwell is said to have planted in his cottage in Hertfordshire, Rebecca Solnit explores how his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power.

Following his journey from the coal mines of England to taking up arms in the Spanish Civil War; from his prescient…


Book cover of A Way to Garden: A Hands-On Primer for Every Season

Mary-Kate Mackey Author Of The Healthy Garden: Simple Steps for a Greener World

From my list on garden books to save the planet.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a person who thinks gardening could be one of the most important endeavors anyone can do. I’m a writer, a speaker, and the recipient of eight Garden Communicators International media awards, including a Gold in 2021 for my column, “Rooting for You,” on the Hartley-Botanic Greenhouse website. My byline has appeared in numerous magazines such as Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Sunset, and This Old House. I’m always interested in great ideas for problem-solving in the garden.

Mary-Kate's book list on garden books to save the planet

Mary-Kate Mackey Why did Mary-Kate love this book?

Many garden books are structured in a classic four-seasons pattern, but this one goes beyond, by delineating the gardening year as steps in the essence of all living beings—from conception in January, adulthood in July and August, to death in December. This clever and thoughtful approach celebrates the fact that we are all woven into the fabric of the natural world. Add to that the author’s lifetime of good gardening experience and advice, and this book shows readers in intimate detail how to work with nature, not against her. 

By Margaret Roach,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Way to Garden as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

For Margaret Roach gardening is more than a hobby, it's a calling. Her unique approach, which she refers to as "horticultural how-to and woo-hoo," is a blend of vital information to memorise (like how to plant a bulb) and intuitive steps gardeners must simply feel and surrender to. For more than twenty years Roach has shared her deep garden knowledge with an appreciative audience, first at Martha Stewart Living and now on her popular website and podcast. Now, with A Way to Garden, she explores how she and her way of gardening have changed over the years. Throughout, she shares…


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Book cover of Norman Mailer at 100: Conversations, Correlations, Confrontations

Norman Mailer at 100 by Robert J. Begiebing,

Winner of the Robert F. Lucid Award for Mailer Studies.

Celebrating Mailer's centenary and the seventy-fifth publication of The Naked and the Dead, the book illustrates how Mailer remains a provocative presence in American letters.

From the debates of the nation's founders, to the revolutionary traditions of western romanticism,…

Book cover of The Regenerative Garden: 80 Practical Projects for Creating a Self-Sustaining Garden Ecosystem

Maria Colletti Author Of Terrariums - Gardens Under Glass: Designing, Creating, and Planting Modern Indoor Gardens

From my list on indoor gardening houseplant.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have spent 25 years working at the New York Botanical Garden! My life’s pursuit of the green has been my greatest achievement. I'm a self-made terrarium designer. I developed my style and skills at NYBG and knew that I had to share this with the world. My books have sold over 14,000 copies worldwide. This is amazing to me and has taught me that my though-ness and step-by-step lessons were worth every word! Horticulture is a subject that comes naturally to me. I happily know the names of dozens and dozens of trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, tropical, desert, you name plants from all over the world and I’m learning new ones every season. 

Maria's book list on indoor gardening houseplant

Maria Colletti Why did Maria love this book?

Stephanie has taught me so much about gardening that I didn't even know I needed to know. Her beautiful lessons about permaculture, a word that I didn't understand what it meant until Stephanie took the time to teach me! This is a must-need book in your gardening library.

She has created a beautiful garden of her own where she time-tests all her teachings. The climate in Vancouver Canada makes this a great environment. Stephanie and I became friends years ago when she started her blog and she has promoted my work on several occasions.

I trust her judgment and know she knows her subject and then some!

By Stephanie Rose,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Regenerative Garden as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Discover how to work with nature, instead of against it, by employing permaculture techniques to create a garden that is not just more beautiful and productive, but also more resilient.

While the word permaculture might sound intimidating, the principals behind it are not. The main goal of permaculture is to turn your space into a functioning ecosystem that’s less reliant on external resources and better able to sustain itself through many seasons of growth and change as it resists pests, diseases, and climate extremes. Whatever the size of your space, from a tiny patio garden to a big backyard, and…


Book cover of The Orchard: A Memoir
Book cover of The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants
Book cover of Otherwise Normal People: Inside the Thorny World of Competitive Rose Gardening

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5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in gardening, Prague, and gardens?

Gardening 88 books
Prague 34 books
Gardens 46 books