From the category archives:

Book reviews

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

any 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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People with Dirty Hands: Garden bloggers’ book club

July 29, 2008

I have been re-reading People with Dirty Hands: The Passion for Gardening by Robin Chotzinoff for the Garden Bloggers Book Club. Just like last time, I am amazed by her ability to ferret these eccentric gardeners out, and in awe of her willingness to drive hundreds of miles to talk to total strangers, some of [...]

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Beautiful at All Seasons: Garden Bloggers Book Club

May 31, 2008

Have you ever been out with a friend, and another person joins you, who is a good friend of your friend, but you don’t know them? And the two of them start talking about people you don’t know, and even though the conversation is mildly interesting (this one had a baby, that one has a [...]

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A Way to Garden: The Book Becomes a Blog

April 20, 2008

I am sure I first read A Way to Garden: A Hands-On Primer for Every Season in 1998, the year it was published. I may have been the first person to pull it off the library book shelf and take it home. It had everything I ever want in a garden book: great photos that [...]

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