Gardeners and Their Gardens
This selection of books is about gardeners and their gardens. Some of the gardeners in these books I have had the pleasure of meeting and it makes these books special to know that they truly show who these gardeners really are.
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A Year in Our Gardens:
Letters by Nancy Goodwin and Allen Lacy
Book Description: This engaging collection of letters follows the course of a year in the gardens of two passionate gardeners, Nancy Goodwin and Allen Lacy. They share a climate zone (7A), but their gardens differ enormously. Lacy gardens on a 100-by-155-foot plot of former farmland in southern New Jersey, on soil so sandy that he must water frequently if he is to garden at all. Goodwin gardens on rich clay loam at her historic piedmont North Carolina home--which comprises more than sixty acres of woodland, meadow, and established plantings--and she refuses to irrigate, because she believes in growing only those plants that are naturally adapted to the conditions of her land.
Through their letters, Lacy and Goodwin provide a charming and revealing chronicle of their lives and the lives of their gardens. They exchange stories of their horticultural successes and failures; trade information about a great many plants; discuss their hopes, fears, and inspirations; and muse on the connections between gardening and music, family, and friendship.
The Curious Gardener
Book Description: Now for the first time in English, one of the world's best-loved garden writers explores the connections between the life of the garden and the life of the mind. In this omnibus volume that ranges from discussing why gardeners should grow bad-smelling plants to how readers should eat their flowers, Jürgen Dahl identifies curiosity and patience as the gardener's chief virtues.
What matters most to Jürgen Dahl is that a garden is not a sterile copy of a picture in a book, or a beautiful "triumph" that lacks all experimentation and wonder. In Jürgen Dahl's garden, things do not "work," but instead they happen — or maybe they do not. Many things that please, surprise, or disappoint a gardener do so because the garden's living creatures can only rarely be tricked into obeying the gardener's will; in their own quiet but unyielding way, they follow their own laws.
Jürgen Dahl's stories are wise and cheerful, and full of opinions and premonitions, all told with the insatiable curiosity of the true explorer. Time and again, author and reader alike are nourished by the never-ending riches of the garden.
Down the Garden Path
Book Description Down the Garden Path has stood the test of time as one of the world's best-loved and most-quoted gardening books. Ostensibly an account of the creation of a garden in Huntingdonshire in the 1930s, it is really about the underlying emotions and obsessions for which gardening is just a cover story. The secret of this book's success---and its timelessness---is that it does not seek to impress the reader with a wealth of expert knowledge or advice. Beverley Nichols proudly declares his status as a newcomer to gardening: "The best gardening books should be written by those who still have to search their brains for the honeysuckle's languid Latin name..." As unforgettable as the plants in the garden is the cast of visitors and neighbors who invariably turn up at inopportune moments. For every angelic Miss Hazlitt there is an insufferable Miss Wilkins waiting in the wings. For every thought-provoking Professor, there is an intrusive Miss M, whose chief offense may be that she is a 'damnably efficient' gardener. From a disaster building a rock garden, to further adventures with greenhouses, woodland gardens, not to mention cats and treacle, Nichols has left us a true gardening classic.
Earth on Her Hands: The American Woman in Her Garden
Book Description: Starr Ockenga has interviewed 18 women who have worked and shaped their land, often over the course of several decades, into their dream gardens. From Ellie Spingarn's Connecticut stone wall to Georgie Erskine's Southern California citrus allée, each has features that are unique but fit seamlessly into their environment. There are meadows, orchards, a bonsai garden, vegetable gardens carved out of woodland, one walled English-style garden, and one that's intensely French, with topiaries, espaliered bushes, and a copper-roofed teahouse. Each woman is a plant collector of sorts, and each garden description is accompanied by a list of recommended plants. This is a joyous, soulful book that explores the complexity of garden-building and the effect it has on gardeners' lives.
Eden on Their Minds:
American Gardeners with Bold Visions
Book Description What distinguishes a great garden from one that is merely beautiful? In her triumphant follow-up to the award-winning Earth on Her Hands, Starr Ockenga illustrates how a diverse group of visionary American plantsmen and women have taken risks, pushed boundaries, and stretched traditions to create distinctive, idiosyncratic gardens. Boldly conceived and boldly executed, these 21 gardens are highly personal interpretations of paradise.
Garden Open Tomorrow
Book Description: This is Nichols's final garden book and the summation of a long career spent enjoying and writing about gardens. Being Beverley Nichols, however, he cannot confine himself to a narrow discussion of gardening for long and provides entertaining asides on cats — including a hilarious critique of feline "ballet" performances — psychic phenomena, and the use of plants to commit murder.
The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll
Book Description The English gardens of Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) have influenced good garden design throughout the world. While many of Jekyll's gardens and original plantings have disappeared, and only a handful of her plans are well-known, thousands survive in archives. Richard Bisgrove has selected a representative sample from this remarkable collection, and the designs-including plans for Jekyll's three American gardens as well as for many of her English gardens-have been redrawn by an accomplished watercolorist and relabeled to make them more accessible to the nonspecialist. Together they provide an astonishing record of Jekyll's versatility as a garden designer and of the painstaking attention to detail that she applied to every aspect of her art.
Graham Stuart Thomas' Three Gardens of Pleasant Flowers:
With Notes on Their Design, Maintenance and Plants
From Amazon.com: As a youth, renowned rose expert Graham Stuart Thomas was considered a little daft by peers and teachers. Obsessed with gardening, the boy never applied himself in school--all his dreams centered on the flowers he'd planted in his father's small yard. He'd rush home from school to gaze at the blooms. His father's was the first of three gardens that defined Thomas's life up until 1983, when this volume was originally published. After his father's house came a large mansion, then a small bungalow, both bought for the potential of the surrounding land. Describing the creation of three gardens at three different phases of life, Thomas's book lies somewhere between memoir and garden journal.
His prose style is an interesting hybrid of casual, chatty memories interspersed with lists of Latin plant names. Although he's a winner of the Royal Horticultural Society's Veitch Memorial Medal, Thomas doesn't write like an anointed expert. Rather, he's humble and open about his own mistakes--one year planting rhododendrons under an oak where they "drooped sadly every summer," or planting ivy near a down pipe where it "thickened and forced the pipes off the wall." Thomas has faith that such small disasters are necessary events in any garden's evolution. --Emily White
In Veronica's Garden
Book Description IN VERONICA'S GARDEN is the remarkable true story of a garden and the larger than life personality of its creator. This is a record of the development of the Milner Gardens and Woodland, a stunningly beautiful garden nestled into the Canadian West Coast Douglas-fir forest.
Ken Druse: The Passion for Gardening
Book Description: Ken Druse’s passion for gardening has always been the unmistakable force behind each of his books. Now, with The Passion for Gardening, Druse writes about this inspiration, the underlying spirit that is shared by all gardeners. This is not a simple how-to book, but a why-to. Why do we garden? And how are our lives immeasurably enriched by the process? As the world around us grows more chaotic each day, Druse, in rich and thoughtful prose, reminds us to slow down, put a trowel to the earth, and consider the wonders and healing powers of tending a garden. Gardening, he tell us, is an antidote for today’s hectic pace.
Legends in the Garden: Who In The World is Nellie Stevens?
Book Description: Legends in the Garden provides short histories of people whose names are associated with some of our most treasured garden plants. The book consists of 46 stories with historical photos of the people, and color photos of the plants they are known for. People such as Nellie Stevens (holly), Frances Williams (hosta), Betty Sheffield (camellia), Carol Mackie (daphne) and Betty Corning (clematis) are only a few of the stories within the book. Places such as Anna, IL (hydrangea), and Corbett, MD (columbine)are also featured.
More Papers from the Potting Shed
Book Description Here is a third collection of the insightful and witty essays of Charles Elliott about the history, practices and eccentricities of gardening. The book covers subjects ranging from the garden writings of Sir Francis Bacon to plant collectors in southern Tibet, potatoes, earthworms, and the Chelsea Flower Show.
The Potting-shed Papers
From Booklist "Devotees of Horticulture magazine will recognize many of Elliott's essays from his column, "The Transplanted Gardener," an often-irreverent look at the idiosyncratic differences between gardening in his adopted Britain versus his native America. The uninitiated will delight in Elliott's take on the fine, and not so fine, art of gardening, no matter where it occurs. From the Andean rainforest, home to the erstwhile Fever Bark Tree, to Boskoop, Holland, home of prodigious plant-producing nurseries, Elliott is both travel guide and garden guru, while piquant profiles of such legendary horticulturists as Roy Lancaster earn him the title of "botanical biographer." Although his pursuit of decidedly offbeat gardening stories is his stock-in-trade, nowhere is his talent more impressive than in the collection's introductory section, "Personal Considerations," in which Elliott regales with his own impressions of everything from British lawn-mowing habits to plant taxonomy. A witty raconteur, learned plantsman, and stylish essayist, Elliott's unbridled curiosity about all things horticultural takes the reader on an intriguing journey down often unexpected yet always entertaining garden paths." -Carol Haggas
Recollections of Great Gardeners
Book Description: In this memoir one of the greatest plantsmen of the last century recalls the great gardens and gardeners that he knew, including such figures as Gertrude Jekyll, Edward Bowles, William Robinson and Vita Sackville-West.
Born in 1909, Graham Stuart Thomas was a friend and adviser to hundreds of the most interesting of his gardening contemporaries, before becoming Garden Consultant to the National Trust. It is an exciting privilege to see his chosen gardens as he went round them with their owners and to note with them the special features and plants that made them outstanding. The admiration he feels for these gardens is transparent, and we meet some outstanding personalities (some well known, some less so) in the company of one who knew them well and shared their passion for plants.
Tasha Tudor's Garden
Book Description Tasha Tudor's poignant art has fascinated adults and children for decades. Her nineteenth-century New England lifestyle is legendary. Gardeners are especially intrigued by the profusion of antique flowers -- spectacular poppies, six-foot foxgloves, and intoxicating peonies -- in the cottage gardens surrounding her hand-hewn house. Until now we've only caught glimpses of Tasha Tudor's landscape. In this gorgeous book, two of her friends, the garden writer Tovah Martin and the photographer Richard Brown, take us into the magical garden and then behind the scenes. As we revel in the bedlam of Johnny-jump-ups and cinnamon pinks, the intricacy of the formal peony garden, and the volumptuousness of her heirloom roses, we also learn Tasha's gardening secrets. How does she coax forth her finicky camellia blossoms in the dead of a Vermont winter? How does she train that fantastic topiary to model for her artwork? How can she keep her crown imperials from tumbling in the winds? Tasha's garden reflects a wealth of family lore, perfected through the years and years of working the soil. We may be dazzled by the beauty of the garden, but we come away from this book with practical ideas about improving our own plots of land. "Paradise on earth" is how Tasha describes her garden, and along with the flowers and the vegetables that provide her food, her paradise is filled with an enchanting menagerie -- corgies, Nubian goats, cats, chickens, fantail doves, and forty or more exotic finches, cockatiels, canaries, nightingales, and parrots, which inhabit her collection of antique cages. Tasha's beautiful watercolors and her enchanting anecdotes color this sublimely beautiful book.
Time-Tested Plants
Thirty Years in a Four-Season Garden
Book Description: This is a sumptuously photographed book, whose images document the charms of its time-tested plants. With only two exceptions, the 250 photographs are taken directly from the author’s garden, adding to the book’s value as a case study in plantsmanship. In this age of “instant” everything--including gardens and landscapes--it is refreshing and instructive to hear a master gardener’s account of those plants that have brought a lifetime of joy and have amply repaid a loving investment of care and patience.
The Transplanted Gardener
Book Description: From the question of why England is so wet - or, in the view of a dripping American, seems to be - to an account of the great Charles Darwin's favorite obsession (it was earthworms), The Transplanted Gardener contains a sparkling set of essays exploring the history, practice, and eccentricities of gardening in "the world's greatest potting shed," England.
We Made a Garden
Book Description: First published in Britain in 1956 and never before available in America, We Made a Garden is the classic story of a unique and enduring English country garden. One of Britain’s most esteemed gardening writers recounts how she and her husband set about creating an exemplary cottage garden from unpromising beginnings on the site of the former farmyard and rubbish heap that surround their newly purchased home in the countryside of Somerset, England. Each imbued with a strong set of horticultural opinions and passions, Mr. and Mrs. Fish negotiate the terrain of their garden, by turns separately and together, often with humorous collisions. From the secret to cultivating the smoothest lawn to the art of lifting and replanting tulip bulbs to the landscaping possibilities of evergreens, the diverse elements of successful gardening—and delightful writing—are bound together by Mr. and Mrs. Fish’s aspiration to cultivate that most precious and slow-growing quality—the fundamental character of a good garden.
The Unknown Gertrude Jekyll
Book Description: This is a selection of 200 of the best articles and other writings by Gertrude Jekyll, who 'changed the face of England more than any save the Creator himself and, perhaps, Capability Brown'.
Although Miss Jekyll designed around 400 gardens, none remains as she intended and few exist today in any recognizable form. Her enduring influence has been achieved not through her spade but through her pen. She published 15 books and contributed well over a thousand articles, notes and letters to numerous magazines and newspapers. But although the books are well known, until now, all but a handful of her other writings have been accessible only to scholars – a situation that this selection redresses. This book covers themes that include garden planning, wild and woodland gardening, climbing plants, water gardening and garden ornament, and includes selected articles. This is a gem of garden writing that all who are interested in Jekyll, planting and design will be delighted to discover.
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