Rainy Side Gardeners Book Shelf

The Lighter Side of Gardening

A selection of books about gardening but a change from the heavy reference books and more on the lighter side of gardening.

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A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed
James Fenton
Forget "bones" Forget "structure." Forget trees, shrubs, and perennials. As James Fenton writes, "This is not a book about huge projects. It is about thinking your way towards the essential flower-garden, by the most traditional of routes: planting some seeds and seeing how they grow."

In this light-hearted, instructive, original "games of lists," Fenton selects one hundred plants he would choose to grow from seed. Flowers for color, size, and exotic interest; herbs and meadow flowers; climbing vines, tropical species-- Fenton describes one hundred readily available varieties, and tells how to acquire and grow them.

Here is a happy, stylish, unpretentious and thought-provoking gardening book that will beguile and inspire both novice and expert alike.

Out in the Garden: Growing a Beautiful Life
Dean Riddle
Back in 1980, when Dean Riddle was a young horticulture student, he "thought annual flowers, not to mention birdbaths, were the heights of frivolity -- things to amuse and occupy little old ladies." Thinking himself a serious plants-man with "no interest whatsoever in design," he dreamed of collecting woodland wildflowers, rare trees, and flowering shrubs native to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he was born and where he developed and nourished a deep love of plants and the natural world.A decade later, after living in various parts of the country and making gardens for other people, Dean Riddle settled in the Catskill Mountains. There, he finally got the chance to make his own first garden-"a small garden of sticks and stones with a swept dirt floor." But instead of planting rare stewartias and speckled trout lilies, he grew old-fashioned flowers and everyday vegetables like the ones he remembered from his aunt and uncle's farm in South Carolina. In the process he learned the value of good design and the importance of relating house to garden. And he discovered that the good life "has far less to do with money than it does with style, awareness, and gratefulness."Riddle's thoughts on gardening are astute and straightforward. His storytelling, while at times poignant, is punchy and hilarious. Honest, helpful, and always entertaining, Out in the Garden is both a "how-to" manual and a memoir -- and succeeds masterfully at both.

The Potting-Shed Papers : From Johnny Appleseed's Apples to Sex and the Single Strawberry--Explorations of Gardens and Gardeners
Charles Elliott
When I first heard the title of this book I immediately had a vision of a smeared journal with vermiculite stuck between the pages. But no this book is about intrigue, scandels at the Chelsea Flower Show and the life of plant hunters. Elliot says he didn't write this to give garden knowledge but give us the background and characters of the gardening world.

Time and the Gardener : Writings on a Lifelong Passion
Elisabeth Sheldon
A new collection of essays by one of America"s premier garden writers.

From her vantage point as an octogenarian gardener, Elisabeth Sheldon knows that one of the most important elements in the making of a garden is the passage of time. This is true in the making of a gardener as well; no great gardener is young. Now, in Time and the Gardener, Sheldon brings this perspective to bear on the process of gardening, in discussions of her favorite plants, and in a handful of portraits of some gardeners of yore.

We Made a Garden
Margery Fish
A delightful story written by the wife of a gardener and who was a gardener in her own right. The story of their garden in England through years together and later when she gardened alone. One of my favorite garden stories.

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