Here are 49 books that V. Sackville West's Garden Book fans have personally recommended if you like
V. Sackville West's Garden Book.
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We’re Chantal Gordon and Ryan Benoit — the cofounders of gardening/design/DIY blog The Horticult. Our site shows you how to create handsome yet effective habitats for your plants. That includes a collection of mounted staghorn ferns under our citrus trees, a vertical garden for your herbs, and a sleek bog for carnivorous pitcher plants. One of our most popular DIYs is how to build an outdoor theater behind your rosemary hedge. We show people how to create outdoor spaces they can deeply enjoy — whether it’s a patio, balcony, or yard. A key to welcoming someone is good design. The more you like hanging out outside, the better care you’ll take of your plants.
As primarily ornamental gardeners, we’ve fallen back on the old excuse about tomato plants being ugly as the reason why we don’t do edible gardening. It’s a lazy excuse! The Beautiful Edible Gardenshows that its titular premise is so not an oxymoron. And it hits the two things we look for most in a garden design book, which are: (1) hyperspecific plant recommendations and (2) solid design principles we can learn from and put into action. Through lucid, inviting instructions and scrumptious photos, The Beautiful Edible Gardenoffers gold like how to select “anchor plants” to establish structure in a landscape, blueberries and culinary sweet bay being top picks. And the transformational effect of planting a “focal point” plant — which has us hankering to bring in a persimmon tree.
Learn how to artfully incorporate organic vegetables, fruits, and herbs into an attractive garden design with this stylish, beautifully photographed guide.
We’ve all seen the vegetable garden overflowing with corn, tomatoes, and zucchini that looks good for a short time, but then quickly turns straggly and unattractive (usually right before friends show up for a backyard barbecue). If you want to grow food but you don’t want your yard to look like a farm, what can you do? The Beautiful Edible Garden shares how to not only grow organic fruits and vegetables, but also make your garden a place of…
We’re Chantal Gordon and Ryan Benoit — the cofounders of gardening/design/DIY blog The Horticult. Our site shows you how to create handsome yet effective habitats for your plants. That includes a collection of mounted staghorn ferns under our citrus trees, a vertical garden for your herbs, and a sleek bog for carnivorous pitcher plants. One of our most popular DIYs is how to build an outdoor theater behind your rosemary hedge. We show people how to create outdoor spaces they can deeply enjoy — whether it’s a patio, balcony, or yard. A key to welcoming someone is good design. The more you like hanging out outside, the better care you’ll take of your plants.
Blending Thomsen’s signature humor with her rockin’ expertise, Kiss My Asteris 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.
Who cares what the neighbours think? "Kiss My Aster" is a hilarious, irreverent, interactive guide to designing an outdoor space that is exactly what you want. Combining entertaining illustrations with laugh-out-loud text, Amanda Thomsen lays out the many options for home landscaping and invites you to make the choices. Whether you want privacy hedges, elegant flower beds, a patio for partying, a food garden, a kids' play space, a pond full of ducks, or all of the above, you'll end up with a yard you'll adore. Forget about doing it the "right" way: Do it your way!
We’re Chantal Gordon and Ryan Benoit — the cofounders of gardening/design/DIY blog The Horticult. Our site shows you how to create handsome yet effective habitats for your plants. That includes a collection of mounted staghorn ferns under our citrus trees, a vertical garden for your herbs, and a sleek bog for carnivorous pitcher plants. One of our most popular DIYs is how to build an outdoor theater behind your rosemary hedge. We show people how to create outdoor spaces they can deeply enjoy — whether it’s a patio, balcony, or yard. A key to welcoming someone is good design. The more you like hanging out outside, the better care you’ll take of your plants.
What if your garden is completely indoors? This coffee table book encapsulates the #plantparenthood aesthetic (love it or hate it) of houseplants mobbed together and houseplants punctuating smooth, sunlit interiors. What givesUrban Jungle real cred though are its specific plant recommendations and care tips. It’s instructive to see what plants you can pair (or herd) together in similar spots — like an opuntia in a super-bright window paired with a huge Dracaena reflexa lurking five feet away. And indeed a fiddle-leaf fig, snake plant, kentia palm, Pilea peperomioides, schefflera, and spider plant all gathered together not only make sense light-wise but are an intriguing study in contrasting textures. It also inspired us to put a palm in front of a warmly colored accent wall.
Urban Jungle: Living and Styling with Plants is a source of inspiration, ideas and a manual for all of those who want to bring more plants into their home. The book guides the reader through different "green" homes in five European countries and shows how beautiful, unique, creative and even artistic living with plants can be. More than that the reader finds endless ideas for styling from the bloggers of the "Urban Jungle Bloggers" community. To complete the topic of indoor plants the book offers easy help for taking care of the plants and DIY tips.
We’re Chantal Gordon and Ryan Benoit — the cofounders of gardening/design/DIY blog The Horticult. Our site shows you how to create handsome yet effective habitats for your plants. That includes a collection of mounted staghorn ferns under our citrus trees, a vertical garden for your herbs, and a sleek bog for carnivorous pitcher plants. One of our most popular DIYs is how to build an outdoor theater behind your rosemary hedge. We show people how to create outdoor spaces they can deeply enjoy — whether it’s a patio, balcony, or yard. A key to welcoming someone is good design. The more you like hanging out outside, the better care you’ll take of your plants.
Now that you know what plants to put where, it's time to explore how those plants will never stop playing with your emotions. Kincaid writes with incredible emotional precision about the gardens she’s designed and planted — evoking specific hybrids of buddleia and aster that’ll send you googling and giving words to the anxiety of a wisteria that’s blooming more than two months late. The pages of My Garden are peppered with Latin names and inspiring combos, like a banana tree in a pot “looking happy amid a background of plants alien to it” including evergreens and monkshood. These plants and design elements like ponds take us on flashbacks to Kincaid’s childhood and young adulthood, and yes, into the scourge of colonization that even the dahlia can’t escape.
One of our finest writers on one of her greatest loves. Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced friends, she planted only seeds of the flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book) she gathers all she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination. Kincaid's affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer but cannot bring herself to love winter, for it hides the garden. She adores the rhododendron Jane…
As an expert in grass ecology and champion of sustainable design, John Greenlee has created meadows not only in the United States, but throughout the world for over 30 years. Some of his most notable gardens include the Getty Museum, the Norton Simon Museum in Los Angeles, and the savannas at Walt Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida. In addition to his consulting and design work for commercial and residential clients, John Greenlee enjoys sharing his knowledge by giving several presentations and lectures throughout the year on the use of natural lawns, native grasses, and meadow restoration.
Don’t be fooled by the small size of this very personal book by the incredible plantsmith Scott Ogden.
You would do well to find this book, now sadly out of print, as it focuses on the attributes of plants that are often overlooked. I’ve had it on my shelf for years and enjoy it constantly. Enjoying the garden at night is often an overlooked aspect of garden design.
Scott’s prose in this book is some of the finest garden writing ever written. Track down this book, you won’t be disappointed. Then walk outside and look at your garden at night with whole new eyes.
In The Moonlit Garden, Scott Ogden introduces readers to the wonder of the evening garden. Written with charm and elegance, this book will appeal to those whose gardens are a source of intellectual stimulation as well as physical beauty and repose.
I discovered cannabis as good medicine in 2009, when my gynecologist recommended it for severe dysmenorrhea. When I couldn’t find a cookbook offering healthy, sophisticated cannabis-infused recipes, I decided to write one. As an amazing group of cannabis chefs taught me how to cook with cannabis and shared their recipes, I fell in love with the plant as well as the open-hearted community that supports it. I followed the Cannabis Kitchen Cookbook, published in 2015, with Pot in Pans: A History of Eating Cannabis, a textbook tracing the plant’s culinary history to ancient Persian and India, in 2019. I’ve learned how to grow my own, and I write regularly about cannabis trends and liberation.
This is the home grower’s bible, written by an OG. Everything you could ever want to know about growing cannabis—but didn’t know to ask—is packed into these 500 pages, and the photos are pure plant porn. Before Rosenthal walks you through the growing process, from garden design to post-harvest, he provides a comprehensive guide to the cannabis plant and how it grows. This book gave me the confidence to grow my own medicine, and that changed my life.
Ed Rosenthal's legacy handbook contains the foundational knowledge, tools, and methods to enable you to grow great marijuana—inside and out.
All aspects of cultivation are covered, from the selection of varieties, setting up of the garden, through each stage of plant growth all the way to harvesting. Use efficient technology and save time, labor, and energy. Photographs throughout clarify instructions and show the stunning results possible by following Ed's growing advice.
This classic guide was groundbreaking when it was first released in 2010. For the very latest in technologies, tips, and techniques, including advances in LED lighting, garden design, genetics,…
When I was growing up, my mother loved to garden. I remember visiting the nursery with her and being captivated by all the rows of flowers with the gorgeous names: marigolds, cosmos, dahlias, fuchsias. Now I have a garden of my own, and it’s my happy place. It adds color and fragrance to my life, and it keeps me grounded (literally and figuratively) when things are stressful. And as a writer, I find that story ideas often come to me when I’m working in the garden. It’s a constant source of inspiration and delight.
My love for this book started at age ten, when I read it for the first time and couldn’t put it down.
It introduced me to many of the tropes I would later come to love: the big house in the country, secrets from the past, the wise mother-figure.
Most of all, though, this story about three children who resurrect a dormant walled garden taught me the power of hope. This novel shows us that although seeds and bulbs may look dead, there is a life inside that just needs care and space to flourish.
It’s a beautiful lesson for children and adults alike.
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett is a magical novel for adults and children alike
'I've stolen a garden,' she said very fast. 'It isn't mine. It isn't anybody's. Nobody wants it, nobody cares for it, nobody ever goes into it. Perhaps everything is dead in it already; I don't know.'
After losing her parents, young Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in her uncle's gloomy mansion on the wild English moors. She is lonely and has no one to play with, but one day she learns of a secret garden somewhere in the grounds that no…
My husband sums up my biography as “I am, therefore I dig.” I live, garden, read and write in Chatham, New Jersey, and have had a long, open love affair with the gardening style “across the pond.” At the New York Botanical Garden I teach English garden history, and I’m a regular contributor to the British gardening journal, Hortus. In my writing, I follow the relationship between the pen and the trowel, that is authors and their gardens. I’ve written books about children’s authors Beatrix Potter and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and, as you might imagine, the research trips to the UK were a special bonus.
Derek Jarmon was a British avant-garde filmmaker, theater designer, and life-long gardener. In the last decade of his life, he built a new garden at a tiny house by the sea in Kent. Prospect Cottage sits on the shingle expanse overlooking the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station and the English Channel. It was an accidental garden, this arrangement of rocks and driftwood, flowers, and found objects. The book sings. Jarmon’s musings and poems wind through a small volume of 140 pages; there are 150 photographs. It is a book about why we garden, how to live, and how to die.
'Paradise haunts gardens', writes Derek Jarman, 'and it haunts mine.' Jarman's public image is that of a film-maker of genius, whose work, dwelling on themes of sexuality and violence, became a byword for controversy. But the private man was the creator of his own garden-paradise in an environment that many might think was more of a hell than a heaven - in the flat, bleak, often desolate expanse of shingle that faces the Dungeness nuclear power station. Jarman, a passionate gardener from childhood, combined his painter's eye, his horticultural expertise and his ecological convictions to produce a landscape which combined…
I’m not an expert in gardening, forestry, or herbal medicine. But like everyone else, I have a growing awareness that our planet Earth is entirely dependent on thriving forests and insects and even weeds. We owe it to our children and future generations to learn about and protect our precious resources. Although I live in the big city of Chicago and have a tiny backyard, last year I turned my little grass lawn into prairie! I have creeping charlie, dandelions, creeping phlox, sedge grass, wild violets, white clover, and who knows what else. (Luckily, my neighbors are on board.) I’ve already seen honeybees and hummingbirds. It’s not much, but it’s something I can do.
Many of us tend to view gardens only from the surface up.
This book dives underground to show how many living things in the dirt are working hard to help us garden. Worms and insects that we might find “gross” are actually essential for airing the soil and warding off invaders.
Plenty of things grow just fine without human help because they have all the helpers they need under the earth. This book shows how nature goes about its business, plants and insects and animals all working together to green the earth.
Bonus: Neal’s illustrations are anatomical wonders, showing worms and bugs with legs and feelers in a friendly light. Squeamish children (and their parents) might make a few buggy friends as they read.
A companion to the new Over and Under the Pond and Over and Under the Snow, this sweet book explores the hidden world and many lives of a garden through the course of a year.
Up in the garden, the world is full of green-leaves and sprouts, growing vegetables, ripening fruit. But down in the dirt there is a busy world of earthworms digging, snakes hunting, skunks burrowing and all the other animals that make a garden their home. In this exuberant and lyrical book, discover the wonders that lie hidden between stalks, under the shade of leaves... and down…
I belong to a family of dog lovers – Oscar, the black cocker spaniel; Buddy, the brown-and-white beagle; Riley, the buff cocker spaniel; Buffy, a black boxer mix, Milo and Max, Golden retrievers. In fact, cavorting with Riley at a San Francisco park was my inspiration for Bark Park. I also love children, especially my grandchildren Connor and Kasey. When Kasey, at five years of age, read my book Bark Park aloud for the first time, my heart swelled with joy! It took me back to my own young daughter Laura whose first all-by-herself read-aloud had been: Go, dog, go! So it’s only natural for me to combine my two great loves – dogs and children – with these book recommendations.
Biscuit is a curious little dog who loves the garden. He scampers about enjoying the butterflies and worms and especially the birds. But when Biscuit accidentally knocks over a bag of birdseed, his accident has a happy ending, for the seeds attract even more birds to the garden. Biscuit in the Garden offers simple words and a simple but engaging plot for young readers who are just beginning to read.
For fans of Clifford and Spot, welcome everybody’s favorite little yellow puppy, Biscuit, in an I Can Read adventure!
Biscuit is excited to explore the garden. From the prettiest flowers to the smallest bugs, there's so much to see. And the little puppy even finds his own special way to add to the garden's bounty!
Biscuit in the Garden, a My First I Can Read book, is carefully crafted using basic language, word repetition, sight words, and sweet illustrations—which means it's perfect for shared reading with emergent readers. Books at this level feature basic language, word repetition, and whimsical illustrations,…
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