34 books like The Informed Gardener

Ann Ralph, formerly in charge of the fruit tree section of Berkeley Horticultural Nursery, has written a short, easy to use, book on caring for fruit trees. It should come with every fruit tree sold, since its text and illustrations so effectively teach the methods of planting, pruning, and ongoing care that will produce delicious fruit. 

Once you have looked at the root drawings of common garden edible and ornamental plants in this book, you will become able to imagine what is going on in the underground part of plants. This ability will help you water by hand or set up a drip system. It will also help you to plant successfully, mulch well, and use the best weeding methods for different plants. The book includes text and diagrams that teach how to set up a drip irrigation system. 

While you will learn much about the nature and management of weeds from this book, you will also find yourself painlessly learning the basics of botany-- the parts of plants, how they live, how seeds evolved, how ecosystems evolve. While she keeps weeds at bay, Stein favors a garden, as do I, in which the desirable plants may self-sow a bit. It is a gardening philosophy that is current and can produce lovely, serendipitous gardens. 

This little book, part of a series put out by the Garden, will show you the best ways to offset climate change in your gardening and landscaping. It includes tips on materials, energy efficiency, and increasing carbon sequestration. A chapter by Amanda Knaul and Susan K. Pell covers the climate footprint of homegrown food. 

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. 

I have a small, mostly shady city yard, but I still haven’t given up hope of growing food outside my back door.

That’s where Emily Tepe’s book The Edible Landscape comes in. With lovely photographs of real gardens and step-by-step instruction, Tepe walks me through how to successfully grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers side-by-side to create a garden that is both beautiful and productive.

The best part of the book is Emily’s 10 favorite lists, featuring plants she loves and recommends.

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.

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.

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.

I wish I could have read this book as I struggled to promote the sites in Seneca Falls to become a new national park. The US Congress directed the National Park Service to seek out and preserve sites that tell “nationally significant” aspects of our country’s history. Naming a place and its remaining structures nationally significant brings notice, interest, visitors, and support. Severely limiting parks focused on women might suggest that women’s history is not nationally significant.

I found the 19 chapters describing the benefits and challenges of selecting, preserving, and promoting the sites, structures, and stories of women’s trials and achievements heartening and inspiring. Each chapter provides valuable insights into the complex process of protecting historical places that reflect women's contributions to our nation's history. These stories highlight the importance of giving due recognition to sites connected to women's experiences and struggles.

Dr. Judith Wellman’s chapter, in particular, is… show more.