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.

Korean angelica

Sooty sweet William

Black pansy

The three flowers pictured all grew in my garden this summer and are featured in Black Plants. (Click on any of the images to see a larger image.) Timber Press sent me a complimentary copy to review.

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 State.

Geography Lesson

Before I explain, let’s start with a brief geography lesson for those of you unfamiliar with New York state. Loosely speaking, the Hudson River Valley connects New York City in the south with Albany in the north. The book starts at the southern end of this valley and follows the Hudson River north, profiling many of the farms located in this valley. A map is included, allowing you to locate each farm and its relationship to the others and to the two major New York cities.

The Challenges of a Modern Farm in a Changing World

I thought I’d use quotes from various farmers to illustrate some of the themes the book presents to the careful reader.

…if it weren’t for the New York State agricultural exemption, the family farm couldn’t exist.
Kathy Longyear, Longyear Farm.

The closer one gets to New York City, the more land costs and the higher the real estate taxes. Without a tax exemption, many farms in the Hudson Valley wouldn’t be able to pay their taxes. Farmers closest to NYC inherited their land and repurposed it, changing the focus to take advantage of what city dwellers would pay most for. There is a constant struggle to hold onto the land when you can make more by selling it than working it.

Agri-tourism is the last refuge of agriculture.
Steve Osborne, Stoutridge Vineyard

Not everyone has the personality to have a public farm.
Thomas Hahn, Hahn Farm

Another way many farms increase their profit margin is to invite the public in–and charge them for it. Some offer you-pick opportunities, others provide tours, hay rides, mazes, community supported agriculture, classes, or a restaurant. One enterprising orchard operates a Lease-a-Tree program. These non-traditional activities have their own challenges, everything from liability issues and creative marketing to the need to smile when you don’t feel like smiling.

Diversity keeps us going, but breaks our backs.
Chris Cashen, The Farm at Miller’s Crossing

I think you need to be possessed to farm, you have to have a calling.
Maria Mikkelsen, Willow Tree Flower Farm.

One Ulster County farmer leaves at 2:30am to get to his NYC market. Another gets up at 3am to spray his trees, if that’s when they need it. On many farms, one or both partners has an outside job to supplement the farm’s income. Farming is more than physically demanding; it challenges the farmer mentally, emotionally, and financially as well. In every farm profiled, you can see the attention to detail and innovative thinking that enables these farms to survive when so many others have not.

Both Tour Guide and Documentary

The primary function of Hudson River Valley Farms is to entice you to visit these farms, and it does that admirably. The photography is wonderful, and directions to all farms, plus the markets they sell at, are provided, as well as the map mentioned previously. If you live or travel to the Hudson Valley region, you will want to consult this book for the opportunity it provides to obtain local food carefully grown. But this book also provides a glimpse into the challenges and concerns of farmers trying to make a living in the face of encroaching development, rising energy costs, and increasingly stringent regulations. If these kinds of agricultural issues interest you, this book merits a place on your reading stack, even if your armchair is far from the Hudson River.

These children toured the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company, one of the farms profiled in the book.

Thanks to Rich Pomerantz, photographer for Hudson River Valley Farms, for providing the review copy.

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 tiny speck of red on that continent, is equivalent to USDA Zone 7, I can only wonder at the searcher’s concept of a hardy plant.

So I considered with a bit of skepticism the word “hardy” in the title of this book, but Gwen soon put me at ease on this point. She gardens in Zone 5b in Colorado, and says that her definition of hardiness is being able to withstand -20F for short periods of time. Many of the plants she discusses are hardy to Zone 3, and most will do well into Zones 6 and 7.

But as cold climate gardeners know, temperature is not the only factor in hardiness by a long shot, and Hardy Succulents excels at helping you determine the best cultural conditions for the succulents you want to grow. Some of these plants will benefit from winter moisture, others will be much happier taking their winter dry. Most want as much sun as you can give them; a few do well in shade. Soil drainage is critical for the cacti and some of the other types of plants covered in this book, but the sempervivums and some of the sedums do fine in clay.

Guess what kind I have?

Hens-and-chicks (Sempervivums) in the stacked stone retaining wall of the Birthday Garden. March 10, 2009.

I suspect this passalong plant is some form of Sedum spurium, perhaps the cultivar 'Red Carpet.' March 24, 2009

If, like me, you’ve received some unidentified succulents as passalongs, you will find this book helpful in identifying and caring for these plants. But if you’re the type of gardener who goes through plant obsessions, needing to work your way through a plant type or genus, proceed with caution. The forms and colorations of these plants, expertly captured by Saxon Holt, are fascinating and possibly addicting. You may well find yourself saying, “I want one of each.” Myself, I feel content with the passalongs that have come my way, except—you know, Sedum spurium ‘Tricolor’ has such wonderful variegation. And Sedum populifolium has an intriguing leaf shape. And—uh-oh, I think I’m in trouble.…

Hardy Succulents is one of the prizes being offered in our scavenger hunt. Sunday, April 12th is the last day to enter.

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 a presentation about my new book, Hardy Succulents: Tough Plants for Every Climate.
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Sempervivum 'Faramir' in Pennsylvania

I live in California and until recently, I have shied away from giving talks about the book because there were no pictures taken in my home state.   But I realize such presentations are a great opportunity to explain something about garden photography and the difficulty of garden publishing for national publishers.

We live in a big country of many climates, almost none so different as upstate New York and California.  In truth, Hardy Succulents is not for either climate, but with that disclosure it becomes a good lesson in hardy gardening for both climates.  Gardeners need to know where photographs are taken when they see a picture and once known, good gardeners can extrapolate information to suit their own climate.

There are succulents native to all parts of the United States and often it is just a matter of knowing which ones are adapted to which climates.

Agave neomexicana in Colorado zone 5

Now all Zone 5’s are not created equally, with different amounts of winter moisture, but if the garden concept is about what sort of tough succulents can be used as focal points in the garden, then the A. neomexicana photograph above tells that story for cold climates. 

Agave attenuata in San Diego

This photograph did not appear in the book but is a photograph that tells the same story of using an agave as a focal point.  But it would be unfair to show such a large Agave focal point to most gardeners in a national book.  At the same time it is unfair to the California gardener to see a photo of a small specimen, lest they be misled about the amount of space the plant will take in the garden.

There are no easy ways to illustrate garden books and hopefully a good publisher will let the readers know where the photographs come from so that the information becomes authentic.  I like to say in my own blog over at Gardening Gone Wild that the camera always lies, because it is so easy to misinterpret a photograph.

Like the soft foliage look of the Agave attenuata above? Here it is again, below.

Tender succulents in annual border

Many gardeners in colder climates are realizing they can use succulents as annuals, as disposable as petunias and can create rich tapestries of shapes and foliage that delight and thrive until the first hard frost.  Succulents also work well in containers that can be protected in winter.

Connecticut desert - a container garden

Few gardeners will go to the trouble of putting an entire garden into containers, but seeing is believing.  All the cactus succulents on the patio above are crammed into a small heated porch in the winter, then hauled out and buried in gravel for the summer.

I think I would just move to Southern California where the look is a little easier:

Southern California low maintenance garden

So much of good gardening is knowing which plants work in which climates and knowing hardiness is a major piece of information.  Almost every climate has hardiness “issues”.  Zone 5 gardeners are lucky compared to zone 3 die-hards.

When I started work on Hardy Succulents I really wanted to photograph the big bold succulents here in California but the publisher (Storey Publishing) and Gwen Kelaidis, my Denver co-author, were not fooled by my complaints of my own hardiness concerns.  In my zone 9 garden (a cold climate compared to San Diego) I too have to bring in tender succulents.

Or I would grow these in my border:

Kalanchoe thyrsiflora, tender succulent

Inspired by the layouts in the book I am preparing a photo show, a green wall of succulents.  You can see them as a web gallery on my website.

Hardy Succulents is one of the prizes being offered in our scavenger hunt Have you entered yet?

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 her brush, one feels somehow renewed under the spell of the author’s singular warmth as we stroll within these pages in the intimacy of the secret garden she reveals.” Uh-oh. This is going to be one of those hearts-and-flowers books, filled with overblown prose. How am I ever going to say something nice about it?

First Impression Misleading

But I was wrong. It’s true Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities is not your typical garden book. It’s not a reference book, it’s not an instruction manual, and it’s not a coffee-table eye candy number. It’s a collection of essays whose common thread is fresh ideas for your garden, so, ahem, I guess the title is actually pretty apt. And the flowery prose of the back cover blurb wasn’t written by the author, anyway.

Beauty in All Its Forms

Think of these essays as a series of conversations with a gardener who has not only learned by doing, but spent some time researching the topics dear to her heart. The essays are loosely arranged chronologically and often touch on fragrant plants, attracting butterflies, or Oriental garden philosophy–often all three in the same chapter. Every essay opens with poetry and often quotes more poetry further on, and every chapter, as well as the front cover, is liberally illustrated with the author’s watercolors. You get the impression that Kim Smith is sensitive to beauty in all its forms, and she wants to share them all with you.

You will surely learn something from this book. In a chapter on her outdoor shower, I learned that some sweet autumn clematis vines have no fragrance at all, which confirmed my own experience of this plant that others call wonderfully fragrant. In a chapter describing her first year in the garden, growing nothing but annuals as she observed what was already planted there, I learned she gets bloom from a second sowing of corn poppies. I suspect my growing season is a bit shorter, so that may not work for me, but it had never occurred to me to try. I love fragrant yellow daylilies, and now I know of a few I didn’t know before. Kim devotes a chapter to them, and is just as fond of good ol’ ‘Hyperion’ as I am. And I had no idea there was a lily-of-the-valley native to North America until I read about it on page 172: Convallaria majuscula.

Prejudiced No Longer

By the time I was done, Kim’s infectious enthusiasm had won me over, and the conversation in my head had changed entirely: Really? I’ll have to try it in my garden. . . . Hmm, I never knew that. The thing is, this book moves at a more leisurely pace, reminiscent of the older time in which her house was built. For Smith, it’s not about the destination, but about enjoying the trip, which really, for a gardener, never ends. It’s a great book to read in the winter, when you want a book to inspire daydreams as you peruse through mail order catalogs. It’s a great book to give to a gardener, precisely because, since it’s not a reference book, how-to manual, or eye candy number, they might not think it’s for them. But if they’re anything like me, they’ll get over their prejudices.

Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities! is one of the prizes being offered in our scavenger hunt Have you entered yet?

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 the setting and plot of The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide.

Delia, the main character, is dying of cancer, and as you might imagine, she struggles to reconcile herself to this. She has written a number of popular household guides, and like any good writer, copes with her present difficulties by writing about them, hence the title of the book.

Her husband is a landscape designer, but Delia is quite familiar with the plants in their garden and until recently was gardening right along with her husband. She looks forward to the plants’ growth and bloom, delights in their fragrances, and includes them in important memories. So this is not a book about gardening per se, but a book in which plants are an integral part of everyday life: the world viewed through the eyes of a gardener. It’s very satisfying to read a novel where plants are so thoroughly interwoven into the inner life of the main character.

You quickly realize that Delia has something unresolved from her past that is troubling her, and it is the engine that drives the plot of The Household Guide to Dying. Despite graduating from college with an English degree, I am the last one to see these things coming, so the ending took me by surprise. Looking back over the course of the book, I could see the author had left clues that a more analytical reader might have put together, but me, I become emotionally involved in every book I read. I found myself mulling over various aspects of the plot and Delia’s character for a couple days afterward, and then I started thinking of friends who would enjoy this book.

That’s where you come in, my gardening friends. Think ahead: summer is coming, and you’re going to want a novel for your hammock, beach chair, or–dare I say it?–garden bench. This would be a good choice, and you could win a copy.

The Household Guide to Dying is one of the prizes being offered in our scavenger hunt Have you entered yet?

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 I always open a garden design book with a sense of trepidation. I am just as “unsure of how to begin” inside my house as out, and I don’t “happily” decorate anything.

And yet, I couldn’t resist the offer to review Home Outside, because I had read many of Messervy’s articles in Fine Gardening and always found them helpful. I particularly remember one on archetypal spaces in the April 2001 issue that really resonated with my own experience.

Natural Evolution in Messervy’s Thinking

I can see that Home Outside is a natural evolution from that eight year old article. Messervy continues to uses metaphors to help you grasp design principles. I especially appreciate how she likens movement through your landscape as a flow of water that pools in certain places and rushes through in others. Many design books encourage you to personalize your space, but Julie goes a step further, providing a brief quiz to help you analyze and categorize your preferences.

Another helpful method for organizing an outdoor landscape is her concept of Big Moves. Big Moves involve three components: a basic layout, an aesthetic arrangement, and a distinctive theme. Messervy is not a design snob. In her world there is room for the homeowner who craves an ocean of lawn and a sidewalk that leads straight to the front door (Exposed basic layout, All Lined Up aesthetic). To further bring home the point that there is no One Right Way to design a home landscape, she devotes a two-page spread to illustrate one rectangular plot of land designed six different ways, everything from The Orderly Garden to Party Central.

Little Tips as well as Big Ideas

In addition to providing strategies for thinking about your outdoor space and what you want from it, there are a lot of tips in the book that help you get the details right, from making sure your fence wraps around a corner, to laying down screening before you install the decking on an enclosed porch or gazebo that mosquitoes don’t fly up through the cracks in the flooring, to this:

For those of us who live in cold climates, choosing the right surface texture for a highly used path becomes critical when the snow flies. Make sure it passes the “shovel test” and is installed as continuous level surface uninterrupted by cracks, juts, or bumps.

If you’ve ever tried to shovel snow from a cracked and heaving sidewalk, you know how wise these words are.

Home Outside is the kind of book where you read for a little bit, and it gets you to thinking, and you wander outside, and squint at your problem area, and change position, and squint again. Then you go back inside and scribble something down, perhaps in your garden journal, perhaps in the margins of the book. It encourages daydreaming, productive daydreaming, the kind that helps you transform your yard from a cookie-cutter replica of the yard next door to a garden that satisfies you aesthetically and emotionally. Whether you plan to hire help or do it all yourself, this book will help you articulate what you want from your landscape and bring it to fruition.

Home Outside is one of the prizes being offered in our scavenger hunt Have you entered yet?

Other Reviews

Two other garden bloggers published reviews of this book the day before I did. You might want to read them as well:

• Pam from Digging’s review
• Susan from Garden Rant’s review
• Linda from Each Little World

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 victims than she ever imagined. It’s like she’s living out Amy Stewart’s latest book, Wicked Plants. Anyway, the drawing for the book will be on March 30thMarch 28th, and I’ll be announcing the winner here. If you follow the link to the giveaway, you’ll find out why.

Update: Jinni Turkelson is the winner. For those of you who got confused, At Susan’s post she linked to her guest post on my blog. At that year-old post there is an update, which provided a link to a page on a different website of hers that had the (no longer valid) entry form.

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 unusual to find an author who didn’t just pass down the received wisdom, but actually tested it and documented her findings.

I checked The Well-Designed Mixed Garden: Building Beds and Borders with Trees, Shrubs, Perennials, Annuals, and Bulbs out of the library when it first came out, and while I have yet to add it to my library, I could see that it, too, was full of workable ideas based on her experience actually installing and maintaining gardens for clients. When people are paying for your time, you need to work efficiently as well as please them aesthetically, and when you can bring that kind of efficiency into the home garden, it only increases the gardener’s pleasure.

Suspicious of “Low-Care”

How, I wondered, could a book about fifty easy plants compare with those first two books? After all, page-a-plant compendiums are all too common, and any gardening book that hints of low maintenance is already suspect. My suspicions were unfounded, as it turns out, but it is unfair to this book to judge it by her first two. This is not a reference work on which to base all your future horticultural practices. Rather, consider it a supplement to those first two books, and you will be well-pleased.

Hypocritical? Who, me?

And reading just a couple of paragraphs into her introduction, I realized that my snipe about low-maintenance was somewhat hypocritical. True, I’m not looking for no-work plants. I love plants and I want to tend them; no outdoor housekeeping for me! On the other hand, I’m certainly not looking for make-work plants–I already feel pulled in too many directions and long for a way to cram more in each day. What I want is exactly what Tracy delivers: plants that look like a million bucks without needing a million hours of babying. The fact that some of them are rather uncommon is a plus. The fact that others are readily available is a blessing.

Honest and Helpful

It’s got to be difficult to write a book like this. How do you narrow down the choices? Tracy has a checklist of criteria (found here) but doesn’t expect every plant to meet every single criterion. And she is honest about a plant’s faults. I’m glad she points out, for example, that Gold-variegated aralia (Aralia elata ‘Aureovariegata’) defoliates after fruiting in late summer, though she loves this plant so much she’s willing to put up with this annoyance. She also provides tips to get the best growth from each plant. I’ve never grown ligularia, but I know a lot of gardeners have trouble with it wilting. DiSabato-Aust plants it inside a plastic garbage bag, with a few holes punched in it for minimum drainage. Knowing a trick like this can make the difference between being happy with a plant and pitching it on the compost pile.

Lastly, I have to love a writer who is blown away by Dragon’s Eye pine (Pinus densiflora ‘Oculis-draconis’), goes gaga over ‘Britt-Marie Crawford’ ligularia (Ligularia dentata ‘Britt-Marie Crawford’), and finds the tumble weed onion (Allium schubertii) gobsmacking. A gardener who not only loves plants, but doesn’t hesitate to borrow from Roald Dahl to describe her passion, is a rare kind of garden writer, indeed.

• For another take on this book, check out this interview on Garden Rant
• Thanks to Timber Press for the review copy