Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of our own Back Yards, by Sara Stein. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993
‘Noah’s Garden’ was one of the early books advocating using native plants and gardening for the wildlife. Stein relates, in wandering fashion, the long process she and her husband undertook of returning a large site to something sustainable and ( Read more... )

A Tapestry Garden: The Art of Weaving Plants and Place, by Ernie O’Byrne Marietta O’Byrne. Timber Press, 2018
In one of the best growing areas in the US, the Willamette Valley in Oregon, the O’Byrnes have created a wonderful garden- or, perhaps it should be called “gardenS”. On one and a half acres they have created a garden with several ( Read more... )

The Inviting Garden: Gardening for the Senses, Mind, and Spirit, by Allen Lacy. Henry Hold and Company, 1998
This is a lovely and inspiring book by the late Mr. Lacy, one that made me long for spring so that I can work in the garden. The first part is built around the five senses, one chapter per- tasting herbs and vegetables; listening to ( Read more... )

The Green Tapestry, by Beth Chatto. Simon and Schuster, 1989
Beth Chatto is a highly respected plantswoman, as both designer and plant ecologist. This book focuses on her own garden, which has many different zones with differences in soil type, sun/shade exposure, degree of moisture available, etc., and shows us how she has planted the areas. Her ( Read more... )

Therapeutic Gardens: Design for Healing Spaces, by Daniel Winterbottom and Amy Wagenfeld. Timber Press, 2015 Gardens can be healing in several ways; they can have a soothing effect on stressed people, they can have features that actually work as physical therapy, they can be geared towards those with limited sight (having tactile and olfactory ( Read more... )

Unearthed: How an Abandoned Garden Taught Me to Accept and Love My Parents, by Alexandra Risen. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016 Just as the author and her husband buy an acre property just outside downtown Toronto, her father dies. This doesn’t make much of a difference in Risen’s life; in her entire life he has hardly ever spoken to her. He didn’t ( Read more... )

Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow, by Tara Austen Weaver. Ballantine Books, 2015 The author’s family wasn’t close- in fact, they’d decided that they worked better living in different cities. But now Weaver’s Seattle based brother has two children and another on the way, and her 70-ish mother decides she needs to move ( Read more... )

Sissinghurst: Vita Sackville-West and the Creation of a Garden, by Vita Sackville-West and Sarah Raven. St. Martin’s Press, 2014 Sissinghurst is the garden created by Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicholson. They bought a Tudor era property that was nearly in ruins (it has a moat! And a tower!), fixed up the buildings without much ( Read more... )

The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World’s Great Drinks, by Amy Stewart. Algonquin Books, 2013 Nature seems to love making alcohol; take any plant with sugars present in it (any fruit and a lot of grains) and let it sit out where wild yeasts can land in it, give it a little time, and alcohol will appear. Humans have been taking ( Read more... )

Kiss My Aster: A Graphic Guide to Creating a Fantastic Yard Totally Tailored to You, by Amanda Thomsen. Storey Publishing 2102 This guide to basic gardening has two things that set it aside from most gardening books: it’s put together like a webpage, full of graphics and references to other pages, and it’s funny. Author Thomsen has a blog of the ( Read more... )