From the category archives:

Book reviews

Cut Flowers Are a Frugal Luxury

February 14, 2010

I had long considered flowers from a florist to be a frivolous expense. You couldn’t plant them, and had nothing to show for it when they finally shriveled up and died. Spend the same amount on groceries, and at least you’ve fed your family, even if it still seems like you’ve got nothing to show [...]

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Black Plants: Book Review

February 9, 2010

Black Plants: 75 Striking Choices for the Garden by Paul Bonine is the kind of book that drives me wild. Seventy-five gorgeous plants and over half of them are not hardy for me. Wait. Maybe it’s just that half of the ones I want to grow aren’t hardy for me. I actually didn’t go through [...]

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Hudson River Valley Farms: Book Review

December 1, 2009

When I first picked up Hudson River Valley Farms: The People and the Pride behind the Produce by Joanne Michaels, I thought it was a typical self-promoting regional book, meant to be sold at gift shops throughout its depicted geography. But I discovered within the farm profiles a commentary on agriculture in New York [...]

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Hardy Succulents: Book Review

April 11, 2009

As Saxon Holt, photographer for Hardy Succulents: Tough Plants for Every Climate by Gwen Kelaidis pointed out yesterday, hardiness is relative. I remember early on in the life of this website, learning that someone from Australia had found my blog searching for hardy plants. Since, according to this map, the coldest zone in Australia, a [...]

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Hardy (where?) Succulents

April 10, 2009

Saxon Holt is the photographer for Hardy Succulents. He shares his perspective on the book in this guest post.
What exactly is a hardy succulent ? How tough is tough ? How cold is cold? How can a garden book cover cover the entire country ? All these questions come to mind every time I give [...]

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Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities!: Book Review

April 9, 2009

Read my review of Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities

Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities!: Notes from a Gloucester Garden by Kim Smith made me aware of my garden book prejudices: What kind of title is that? You just don’t start a title with “oh” and end it with an exclamation point! And then I read the back cover: “Drawn by the tender magic of [...]

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The Household Guide to Dying: Book Review

April 8, 2009

I can just hear you now. “Kathy, what is a fiction book doing on your blog? Why are you offering this as a prize in your scavenger hunt?” I was wondering the same thing when an editor from Penguin emailed me offering a review copy, but it turns out gardens and gardening are woven through [...]

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Home Outside, Creating the Landscape You Love: Book Review

April 7, 2009

Julie Moir Messervy opens Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love by remarking,
Most of us feel less confident about creating outdoor living spaces than we do about our interiors. Inside, we happily paint walls, choose finishes, and buy rugs, furniture, and fixtures, but when we step outside we’re unsure of how to begin.
Maybe that’s why [...]

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Win Susan Wittig Albert’s latest China Bayles mystery

March 26, 2009

Susan Wittig Albert is giving away an advance reading copy of the latest installment in her China Bayles series, Wormwood. If you don’t know China, she used to be a high profile lawyer, but decided to switch careers and sell herbs in a small Texas town. Only she still has more to do with murder [...]

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50 High-Impact, Low-Care Garden Plants: Book Review

February 24, 2009

I confess, when I first heard 50 High-Impact, Low-Care Garden Plants by Tracy DiSabato-Aust was coming out, I was dismayed. I have the first edition of The Well-Tended Perennial Garden, which was incredibly satisfying because it was based on her own close observation and methodical experimentation. At the time it was published, it was very [...]

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In the Garden with Jane Austen: Book Review

January 13, 2009

I first read Pride and Prejudice in grade school, when my grandmother put a volume of Readers Digest Condensed Classics for Children in my hands. I’ve read Pride and Prejudice (unabridged) several times since then, but I never had a good grasp of the culture of that day and missed some subtle humor in the [...]

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Three gardening books for children

November 18, 2008

Many gardening books for children take what I think of as the art project approach: here’s what you need, this is what you do, isn’t that cute?, now show it to Grandma. Very few books out there take children–or a child’s interest in gardening–seriously.
I prefer to regard children as apprentice gardeners, gradually acquiring more skills [...]

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The No-Dig Garden Experiment

September 30, 2008

It all started when Jenn said my new bird bath needed some phlox. “Gosh, she’s right,” I mused. “And I have some bright pink phlox in the front bed that I want to move out before I dig out the goldenrod infestation. Those pink phlox would look perfect by the bird bath.”
Bird bath transforms septic [...]

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