We. Are. MOVING!!! After 21 years, 9 months, 11 days* in the same location, Purdyville is relocating twenty minutes further out to the middle of nowhere. We are just about doubling our floor space, with 167% more bedrooms and 250% more bathrooms. Total acreage will be less than we currently have, but, trust me, there is still plenty of space to garden in!

Seeing Trees Giveaway

While I’ve got your attention, I’d like to mention that Timber Press is giving away a copy of Seeing Trees, one of their newly released titles, plus an original print from the book. All you have to do to enter is submit your email address at the link in the previous sentence. I had a chance to look through this book at the Seattle Fling, and it is drop-dead gorgeous. If you love trees, or if you love good photography, you will love this book. The giveaway ends on September 9th, so hurry on over there. And while you’re there, check out the Timber Press blog.

*As of this writing. We haven’t moved yet, so the total time will be a bit more.

I have clay soil and several kinds of rodents in my garden, and I’d pretty much given up on growing tulips, but Gardening with Tulips by Michael King is making me reconsider. Not just because of the gorgeous color photos on every page, but because it’s filled with specific advice on using tulips as an element of garden design. There’s the obligatory chapter on botany and history (I am so sick of tulipomania, and I think King is, too), but the book then devotes several chapters to different ways that tulips can function in the garden’s overall design and the varying effects that can be achieved depending on the companion plants chosen.

King reviews the standard tulip divisions and highlights the most garden-worthy cultivars within each division. A chapter organizing cultivars by color follows, a more efficient design tool than paging through a handful of catalogues trying to find a good match. The book ends with a chapter on culture, including how to get non-blooming tulips back to blooming size and recognizing diseases. 

King is opinionated; he doesn’t like double tulips and as for crocuses, “their goblet-shaped flowers look heavy and vulgar in such close proximity to the far more elegant tulip flowers and the result is simply ugly.” But he never lets his prejudices stop him from telling you what you need to know to achieve the look you want.

Originally published in Horticulture, April 2006 as one of several mini-reviews.

I have pretty high standards when it comes to children’s books. I don’t like them to be preachy or didactic or otherwise disrespectful of the reader, who may or may not be a child. Last night D., my eight-year-old daughter, and I read two children’s books by Kathryn O. Galbraith that I received as review copies, and they both passed muster. I have to concede that both books were trying to get a message across, which could have made them didactic, except that the message was integrated into the story well enough that you didn’t feel like the author was saying, “Learn this; it’s good for you.”

Of the two, I liked Planting the Wild Garden better. The illustrations in this book are marvelous: botanically accurate drawings of plants and seeds abound. The endpapers are illustrated with a fascinating array of seeds and seedheads, and D. and I spent several minutes poring over them and identifying as many as we could. I really hate it when I see children’s books illustrated with generic daisy and tulip flowers, as if the artist were no more capable of rendering plant forms than the children themselves, yet you wouldn’t find a similarly formulaic house or car in the same book. In contrast, the illustrations by Wendy Anderson Halperin were wonderfully detailed. A child could use this book as an impromptu field guide, but it also has a bibliography so the child (or the parent reading to the child) can learn more. I heartily approve.

D, on the other hand, liked Arbor Day Square better. It has more of a story line and more people (as opposed to plants and animals) doing things. You start to understand why trees are important to people for emotional reasons as well as practical ones. You see how hard they had to work to get them established. It wasn’t so easy to grow trees on the prairie; the reason it was the prairie, after all, is because grasses were better adapted to the climate than trees were. Yet after the initial hard work, every tree thrives in this fictitious town, which is kind of a fairy tale ending.

I couldn’t resist reminding D. that Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband unsuccessfully attempted to establish a tree claim. As much as I like gardening, I don’t like to whitewash the fact that not everything you plant thrives. I sympathize with the main character, Katie, who isn’t sure the spindly trees will survive (after enduring a long train ride, no less). I wish her daddy didn’t just laugh her off. It would have been better to acknowledge that growing the trees was going to be a challenge, but worth it, even if not every tree made it to maturity.

But maybe that’s why I don’t write children’s picture books. I don’t want to pretend that things are that simplistic. I don’t think children are that simple-minded. And I don’t want to foster romantic myths about planting trees that will wind up discouraging some future gardener, who’s been led to believe that there’s nothing much to it, only to find an expensive tree dying on him for lack of proper care.

Do you think my standards are too high? Am I being too picky?

Update: Since I wrote this post, I discovered a list of books that have won the Growing Good Kids book award. Follow the link for a list of “the best of the best in children’s garden fiction.”

Would you like to win some easy-to-grow vegetable seeds? Check out the High Mowing Seeds Giveaway! Deadline is March 13, 2011

My first reaction upon opening Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise by Michele Owens was, “Ah, a gardening book without pictures.” I am more of an essay person myself, and it seems like it has been a long time since I have found a newly published collection of garden essays to read. But while any of the chapters in this book could function as a stand-alone essay, they are even better as parts of a whole.

The Secret Is Out

Michele gives away the secret: gardening isn’t as complicated as it’s been made out to be. Or perhaps I should say, gardening can be as complicated as you want to make it–or as simple. In her chapter on Money, I was reminded of similar parallels between new gardeners and new parents. For both, the industry wants to sell you a plethora of “essential” equipment, when in reality there are few essentials and the rest may or may not make life more convenient for you. And there are as many methods or styles of gardening as there are gardeners. There’s no one right way to garden.

There’s plenty in this book that I’d wish I’d known when I started out, but figured out for myself eventually. Facts such as, every year, some vegetables will do better than others, due to factors beyond your control, namely, the weather. And that most of gardening is learned on the job, by trying something and seeing if it works. And that double-digging and rototilling are not the best ways to condition your soil. I found myself nodding my head in agreement numerous times. This is exactly what I’d tell anyone just getting started, backed up with more research than I’d be able to muster. (Some soil bacteria are mood lifters? Who knew? Yet veteran gardeners would not be surprised.)

It’s Not Quite The Same For Me

But there are ways in which my gardening experience has differed from Michele’s. I’ve yet to mulch my entire garden the way she has, though I’m sure it would save time and improve the soil. Why don’t I? Part of it is a failure to find suitable inexpensive mulch materials in sufficient quantity. Maybe that is a lack of imagination, or perhaps a lack of social skills. Or maybe I’m just scared that once I have that big pile of whatever sitting in the driveway, I won’t have the time or energy to get it distributed over the garden, and the whole family will be mad at me, and I’ll look like a fool.

And frankly, gardening hasn’t had the same slimming effect for me as it obviously has had for Michele. I certainly agree that gardening is good exercise, but for me, even at the height of the gardening season, it needs to be supplemented with additional exercise if I’m going to see a downward trend on the scale. Maybe that’s my metabolism, or maybe I don’t work as hard as Michele. I just want to point out that gardening may not be the total solution for your weight problem, even if it is the most soul-satisfying one.

Michele’s children seem uniformly gung-ho about gardening, but some of my kids are more enthusiastic than others. Some make it clear that the only contribution they want to make is eating. A few want to indulge their spring fever by helping to dig on the first mild day; after that, forget it. And a few others, the diehards, want the whole enchilada: to plant, to weed, to water, to harvest. But all of them, regardless of their level of involvement, know where their food comes from, and they all know that store-bought produce doesn’t taste nearly as good as homegrown.

Finally, arugula is one of Michele’s must-grow crops, but my arugula is just too bitter. What am I doing wrong?

Gardening Is As Varied As Humans Are

But really, all those differences just prove Michele’s point: that gardening is a human activity, and is as endlessly variable as humans themselves. If you’ve tried gardening and were disappointed by the weeds or the skimpy harvest, read Grow the Good Life. I bet you’ll be inspired to try again. And if you’ve thought about growing your own food, but just weren’t sure, I think Michele will persuade you to overcome your hesitation. Just remember: start small, feed the soil, and grow what you like to eat.

Rodale Press sent me Michele’s book to review not knowing whether I would or not. I thought it was worth sharing with you. And I suppose I should confess that my husband, the Gentleman Farmer, is the vegetable grower in the family. I pretty much stick to the inedible ornamentals, though I cook what he grows.

Living in Ontario, Brian Bixley has the well-earned ambivalence of the cold climate gardener, calling winter “the icicle in the soul of the gardener” and yet acknowledging its “shivery perfection.” But the range of his thought and the dry subtlety of his wit in Essays on Gardening in a Cold Climate go beyond the confines of one region or climate.

Who can help but smile as Bixley relates

…Walpole said of Kent that ‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.’ From the first time I encountered that phrase, I loved the visual image, of a still slender, youthfully middle-aged, perhaps dandyish figure sailing over the confining fence, the sense of psychological freedom as Kent skipped, or scissored, or straddled, or did the Fosbury Flop, one of those long-legged long-armed characters from illustrations to slightly scary children’s stories, a frayed jacket and an Old School scarf flying in the breeze.

While seriously considering the relationship of a rural garden to the larger natural landscape surrounding it, Bixley avoids descending into academic pomposity by confessing to his outlandish mental picture of a phrase “cherished by garden historians.” Yet it is only after tracing the idea of nature held by proponents of the English Landscape Garden, and articulating his own resolution to this tension between artifice and nature, that he ends his essay by revealing that

the fence that Kent metaphorically leaped was, alas, …not a rail fence or a wire fence but a sunk fence. Kent floated not upwards, but downwards. He didn’t need to leap to see what lay outside the garden. The garden historians, with the exception of Walpole, don’t tell us that.

Now this is one of the things I like about Brian’s writing: he never takes himself too seriously. But he is very serious about gardening. In fact, he calls it “the most profound and complex of the arts.” Indeed, the arts are never far from Brian’s musings; he draws upon literature and music to understand his garden and to better examine the broader issues of garden design and history. And yet he can devote a whole essay to one tiny draba and cause this non-alpine gardener to hold her breath, wondering if the plant will make it.

There is a satisfying mix of the theoretical and the practical in this collection. You will find critiques of garden history and instructions on creating a maze in a meadow with a hand-pushed lawn mower.

Brian Bixley's maze. Photo, though not included in the book, was provided by the author

On the basis of [Sternbergia lutea] flower production from 1984 through 1987 I had been moved to make some alternative forecasts of what was likely to happen in the years to 1995 (see diagram.)

Yes, he includes the graph of his projections for your perusal. Throughout, there is an intelligence and wit underlying the writing, drawing on knowledge of the larger world and synthesizing it in the world of the gardener.

I still feel I have not done this book justice. If you find your thoughts wandering as you weed, not only working out gardening logistics and resolving pedestrian conflicts but connecting the dots between seemingly disparate topics, you will love this book. I don’t know why Essays on Gardening in a Cold Climate is not more widely known. I don’t know why Brian Bixley is not as well known as Eleanor Perenyi or Henry Mitchell. Perhaps it is because he published the book himself and is the only source from which you can obtain it. Yes, Brian is hoarding the world’s supply, and quantities are limited. Order your copy here before they’re all gone.

Late last week I received a review copy of Crocuses: A Complete Guide to the Genus by Janis Ruksans. This is the kind of gardening book that makes my garden-geeky heart beat faster. It focuses on one genus, and endeavors to tell you everything you could possibly want to know: growing in an open garden, growing in green houses, growing in pots, starting from seed, and pests and diseases. And that’s just Part One, less than a fifth of the book.

In Part Two, Ruksans explains the botanical characteristics of the genus, and then the meat of the book begins: Classification. I like what he says at the beginning of this section:

We can look at plant classification from two viewpoints. One is strictly scientific and is the domain of scientists and profesional botanists. The other is a practical viewpoint in which gardeners put the findings of scientists to good acount in a way that is accessible and useful for their purposes.

Doesn’t that sound sensible? This section is subdivided into Autumn-Flowering Crocuses and Spring-Flowering Crocuses, and those subsections are broken into related groups. At the beginning of each group is a botanical key that would enable you to identify the species you have. Following this key is a lengthy description of each species, where Ruksans tells you everything he knows about the species, including where he may have seen it, in the wild or in a grower’s nursery, and everything he has read about the species. There are 307 color photos, arranged in two sections of “plates,” and if there is a picture of that species, the plate number is listed. Some of the photos are of crocuses in the wild. I especially love this, to see crocuses growing “like weeds” in a steep mountain meadow.

Ruksans First Book

I had the opportunity to hear Ruksans speak shortly after his first book, Buried Treasures: Finding and Growing the World’s Choicest Bulbs was published. His Latvian accent was a bit difficult to decipher, but his passion for flowering bulbs of all types was unmistakable. He spoke in three sessions, one on fritallarias, one on corydalis, and one covering a multitude of species from the “bulb belt of previous USSR.” Many of the slides from his talk were the same as those in Buried Treasures. Ruksans has an international mail order nursery, and according to this forum thread, has issued a 2011 mail order catalog. If Ruksans’ email is the same as in 2008, you can request a pdf catalog from janis.bulb at hawk.lv. But please take Craig’s precautions into consideration. A group order is the only way to go, as there are several fees as well as air shipping, all subject to the exchange rate current at the time Ruksans ships.

A Plea For Colchicums

I need a book like this for colchicums. I have already been told I should write such a book, but I don’t have the scientific knowledge. (If I did, I wouldn’t need the book!) I can’t develop a key for identifying species, I haven’t seen a single colchicum in the wild, and I know no more than what I’ve read in A handbook of crocus and colchicum for gardeners, by E. A. Bowles, the last scientific work on the genus. But I can write, and I’d be more than happy to co-author such a book with a colchicum expert who has the knowledge but perhaps not the time or willingness to turn that knowledge into accessible prose. I already talked to someone at Timber Press about this, and they said there wouldn’t be a market for it. So I guess I’ll have to develop the market, first.

Last year, I started a garden at our school in a small town in Northern New York as part of a program out of Cooperative Extension.  I was nominated to lead a 4-H group at a meeting I didn’t attend.  I consider myself an enthusiastic and somewhat knowledgeable gardener.  A leader of small children?  I was ill-prepared – and terrified!

The author (center) started a garden at her children's school last year.

How to Grow a School Garden: A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers,

This is a book about how the authors started and grew their school garden at an urban schoolyard in San Francisco.  It talks about their experiences, and offers tips and pointers, some of which I found extremely valuable.  But one can’t help but get the feeling that these authors have never left their community, or have any connection with the process of starting a garden in, let’s say, rural Northern New York.  For example, on the back cover, it touts “Teach in the garden classroom year round”.  Most of the school year, our garden is under a giant pile of snow that the plow dumps on it, which the kids love more than any other piece of playground equipment.

The authors devote a lot of time to discussing fundraising strategies and garnering support.  The garden design discussed in the book seemed incredibly elaborate, and probably did need a lot of money to build.  They also paid someone to serve as a garden coordinator, and suggested hiring a landscape architect.  I think more time could have been devoted to a different scenario of school garden, one built by a few volunteers and a few families and businesses donating time and materials.  We built a 32′ x 52′ garden with a periphery of raised beds for about $300, with donated leaves, rotten pumpkins, manure, dirt, wood chips, etc., and we raised money for seeds by selling seeds as a fundraiser.  Pretty simple. 

I located most of my design ideas on the internet, and from books on children’s gardens from the library.  Yet I found the design section of this book oddly lacking in — designs!  Maybe they thought that was for a different book, or if they put in enough links in the back of the book, you could figure something out.  In fact, they don’t talk much about the specifics of actual gardening.  I think they assume a certain level of knowledge.  They do talk about design, and offer a few caveats and must haves,  but it almost feels as though they are talking around it.

The school garden in July, when the kids were no longer in school, was maintained by volunteers

Although sometimes I felt like the authors were gardening on another planet, overall there is much to recommend this book.  Use it as one resource as you begin your journey towards growing your own school garden – it is far from a “complete guide” as the title suggests, but has invaluable tips and information that I wish I had had before I broke ground in our garden.

Lee Valley is selling remaindered copies of A Gardener’s Guide to Frost: Outwit the Weather and Extend the Spring and Fall Seasons for only $7. This has got to be the best book for cold climate gardeners that I’ve read, but hardly anyone seems to know about it. (Read my review of A Gardener’s Guide to Frost here.) If you garden in a cold climate this will enable you to know the enemy so you can defeat it–at least temporarily. And knowing more about frost might well enable you southern gardeners to extend your season significantly.

Unfortunately I did not discover this until today, the last day of their free shipping offer. If you don’t read this in time, I still think it is a worthy addition to your library. If the books are remaindered, that means it is the end of the printing run, and I doubt it will be reprinted. If my past experience is any indication, you will soon have to pay more for a used copy than a new, but remaindered one.

The Perennial Care Manual: A Plant-by-Plant Guide: What to Do and When to Do It by Nancy Ondra is the book I wish I’d had in my hands when I first started growing ornamental perennials over twenty years ago. Wait, make that over thirty years ago, when I was in high school and didn’t even know perennials existed until my girlfriend’s mother showed me the Wayside Garden catalog. Back then, there was no Amazon to search for books on a particular topic, and the gardening books at my library were written in a dry, third person tone–an attempt to be objective and scientific I’m sure, but it left me wondering if the author really liked gardening, or just thought it was good for you.

You will have no doubt of Nancy Ondra’s enthusiasm after reading the first page of her book: “True gardeners know that the real fun of gardening is in the process–the planning, the planting, the nurturing, and the learning.” I could tell as I read through the book that Nancy carefully observes her plants throughout the year, taking notes on what she’s learned. That’s the kind of gardener I want to learn from!

Nancy Ondra is Honest

Even more important, she’s honest. She addresses such topics as perennials that self-sow too freely, ground covers that cover more ground than you expected, and invasive plants. She offers general suggestions for dealing with these problems, and also highlights them when profiling specific plants. For example, she tells you that Tradescantia (spiderwort) had pretty flowers, but they only last a day. Furthermore, the plant tends to sprawl and can self-sow prolifically. I have one spiderwort myself, ‘Concord Grape,’ and while I agree the flowers are short-lived, I haven’t had the flopping or self-sowing problems. But I know to look for the seedlings now. More importantly, a novice gardener trying to decide between two plants can make a more informed decision.

Throughout this book, both in the first section of general principles and the second section on specific plants, Ondra guides you to best practices and common sense solutions, saving you time, money, and aggravation. If you don’t have a gardening neighbor or relative who will share their favorite plants, encourage you as you split your first daylily, and in general show you how to do things, this book will be the next best thing.

Review copy supplied by Storey Publishing. Link to Amazon is an affiliate link.

June 2008

January 2009

April 2009

Shortly after that, I read Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart. She makes the inner workings of the cut flower industry a fascinating read. It never occurred to me that cut flowers came from all over the world, that pesticides were heavily employed in their production, or that how they were cared for from the time they were cut, while they were in transit, and even after you place them on your table affected how long they would last. Amy claimed, with proper care, they would last a week in your home.

May 2006

September 2007

June 2003

April 2007

For the mail lady. A small nosegay created by a child, neither elaborate or expensive, can still brighten a grownup's day.

Click on each flower arrangement for a larger image and a description of the flowers. Flower Confidential was a review copy provided by the publisher.