A Bookworm Hits the Garden
Gardening books that will help you become a better gardener
So much of gardening is about how you plan, work and maintain your garden.
It's not really a matter of how hard you work in your garden; it is how
smart you are working that is the final determinant in the success of
your garden (I suspect I’m preaching to the choir, as you yourself
are already here seeking information).
The Web is an unprecedented source of information; there has never been
the access to knowledge we currently possess. Yet I find myself drawn
back to the written word time and again, the old lure of the turned page
calling me... I guess it’s clear that I’m fond of books and
gardening books in particular. I have collected them for fifteen
years now and in that time I have come to know a lot of books on gardening.
Some have come and gone and some have stayed with me for over the years;
while it is strictly opinion and not a critique of true merit, I will
offer a listing of the latter and sprinkle in a few new favorites. (Please
feel free to contact us with any book you feel I’ve over-looked;
I’m always interested to see what everyone else is reading; yes,
it is me reading over your shoulder on the train).
Garden Planning and Design
If the garden is a labor of the mind the most prodigious task is the planning
and design of it (I suspect it is as much a labor of the heart, but even
the heart needs guidance sometimes). Books on garden design make
up a large portion of my library and number among my favorites; I have
started with this category so I can start with my favorite book, The
Inward Garden: Creating a Place of Beauty and Meaning by
Julie Moir-Messervy. I come back to the phrase I just wrote, the
garden as a labor of the heart and it has been this book that has shown
me how true that saying is. Julie asks us to touch the child inside and
remember what a garden meant to that person who still lives in our past,
to bring what once was childhood fantasy into our adult reality and change
our present in the doing; gardening is, at its roots, getting in touch
with the primal. I fell in love with this book a decade ago and time has
not tarnished that; if you are looking for that big idea to pull the rest
of the garden together, this is the book. (Of her other books, Contemplative
Gardens is a study of some of the most fascinating gardens on
earth and The Magic Land: Designing Your Own Enchanted Garden
is a perfect start for the beginner- available new
or like
new ).
Native Plant Garden Books
Some of my other design favorites include the wonderful books of Ken
Druse, in particular his first two, The
Natural Garden and The
Natural Shade Garden. It was these books that opened my eyes
to the potential of native plants in the landscape, and the need, with
our modern lifestyles and schedules, for a more relaxed, wilder style
of landscape design that doesn’t require the maintenance of the
older, more formal techniques.
Ken Druse was also was my introduction to two more of my design heroes,
Wolfgang Oehme and James Van Sweden, who had been preaching
just that tenet of freer plantings of grasses and perennials in drifts
and sweeps since the 50’s when they started their landscape design
business in Washington, D.C. (If you’re in D.C., check out the gardens
around the Federal Reserve Building, it’s a signature Oehme/Van
Sweden design).
Their books, Bold
Romantic Gardens, Gardening
With Nature and Gardening
With Water have held a place on my shelf for years, just never
the same space as they are in use constantly. They coined the phrase
New American Garden to describe their style, but it took Carole
Ottesen to write the book by that title New
American Garden. The subtitle of the book, A Manifesto for
Today’s Gardener, gives a small hint of the revolutionary ideas
this book introduced in 1987. It historically tracks the American landscape
from inception and then presents a case for throwing the old model out
(Hear, hear!)
The Traditonal Garden Book
For those who are looking for a more traditional look to the garden, I
recommend Penelope Hobhouse’s On
Gardening. Penelope is the grande dame of the English
bed & border set and her book, Garden
Style (out of print but available like
new) adds to her reputation. But lest we take the opinion that she
is locked into that supposedly stodgy English mindset, we need look no
further than Penelope Hobhouse’s Natural
Planting to see that neither she (or English gardens, for that
matter) are entrenched in any rigid or inflexible styles.
But if that traditional garden is exactly what you’re looking for,
The
Classic Garden
by Graham Rose is a great read and an inspiration for your space.
Graham explores the English garden from its archetype, the 19th Century
manor garden, but don’t feel you need the big garden to pursue that
big idea; many of the tips in here are just as rewarding in the small
garden as they are in the bigger landscape. Another great glimpse into
the minds of the classical English garden designer is George Plumptre’s
Great Gardens, Great Designers. A decidedly
British look at the world of garden design, it does touch on a few of
the American masters like Church, Steele and Oehme/ Van Sweden ( be sure
to look for Church’s Gardens are for People;
this is the designer who gave us the kidney shaped swimming pool and “California
Style” gardens). But we are looking more at designer’s here
than gardens, let’s get to some more tactical tomes.
Focus on Garden Design
The real crux of garden design is finding the theme, and then finding
the right plants and features to convey your theme. Hopefully one of the
books that we have discussed has given you the former; let’s look
at some to help with the latter. I often turn to nature for inspiration
and that’s the theme for Reflecting Nature: Garden Designs
from Wild Landscapes by Jerome and Seth Malitz.
This father/son team looks at archetypal landscapes like waterfalls or
deserts and then shows you both wild and garden examples to illustrate.
The final chapter on Japanese gardens was a treat as I am a big fan; more
on that in a moment.
Another inspiration is Sara Stein’s Noah’s
Garden. Basically it’s the true story of a suburbanite
gardener who began to notice that as she gardened on her property, nature
began to leave. She tells in her own words of her conversion from a regular
shrub and flower gardener into a backyard naturalist, and of the amazing
garden she gained in the process. If this book shifts your paradigm as
much as it did mine, then you have to get Planting Noah’s
Garden as well; it is the step by step plan for doing the
same in your yard. This is a timely book and an even better idea for much
of our suburban landscape; it’s both low-maintenance and easy on
the planet. I completed a native landscape for a customer this year who
tells me she is already seeing more species of birds at the feeder; I
feel like I climbed Everest when I hear stuff like that.
The Appreciation of Nature
Another incredible find for my wild garden collection came from a most
unlikely source; I was not expecting a new book from Henry David Thoreau
as he’d died in 1862! Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s
Rediscovered Last Manuscript was the labor of Bradley
P. Dean who gleaned through the notes of what was to be Thoreau’s
greatest labor and finished the work of the man cut down at 44 by tuberculosis
a century and a half earlier.
Thoreau had not really accepted the acclaim for Walden
or A Week On The Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
He wrote shortly after, “I feel ripe for something, yet do nothing,
can’t discover what that thing is.” He envisioned a sweeping
master work that would put Nature’s secrets in order, “To
watch for, describe all the divine features which I detect in Nature.
My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in Nature- to know
his lurking places.” His close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson had published
the manifesto of the Transcendentalist movement, Nature, in which Emerson
writes “foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;
we through their eyes. Why should we not enjoy an original relation to
the universe?” I suggest that this Transcendentalist Imperative,
as it became known, was the inspiration for Wild Fruits.
Thoreau offers the woods as a cornucopia, a forgotten market basket of
things to sustain the body and yet, in the detection and collection thereof,
provides those first hand glimpses of God as Emerson had suggested. Dean
has done an admirable job of organizing the thousands of notes on flowering
and fruiting times for the wild plants of New England and they are invaluable
to the wild gardener, but it is the prose of Thoreau that springs out
of the myriad of dates and fruiting conditions of this plant or that;
of red oak acorns he writes, “How munificent is nature to create
this profusion of wild fruits, as it were, to merely gratify our eyes!
Though inedible they are more wholesome to my nobler part, and stand by
me longer than the fruits which I eat. If they had been plums or chestnuts
I should have eaten them on the spot and probably forgotten them; they
would have afforded me only a momentary gratification, but, being acorns,
I remember and as it were feed on them still. Yet as it respects their
peculiar and final flavor, they are untasted fruits, always in store for
use, and I know not of their flavors as yet. That is postponed to some
yet unimagined winter evening. These which we admire but do not eat are
the real ambrosia- nuts of the gods. When time is no more we shall crack
them.” This is more than a native plant primer, it is an American
literary treasure that could only be critiqued for its incomplete nature;
a great shame that he did not live to finish it.
A More Civilized Book
If your design tastes run to the more civilized styles, perhaps Hillier
Garden Planning by Keith Rushford, Roderick Griffin,
and Dennis Woodland is the book for you. A soup to nuts look at planning,
and planting your garden, the only downfall might be the lack of connection
to the American gardener as many of the cultivars and a few of the species
listed may be impossible to find in the States. The same critique could
be made of Roy Lancaster’s What Plant Where,
and yet I find that both these books come off the shelf with regularity
when I am stumped for just the right plant or grouping, so they merit
inclusion on that basis alone. Graham Rice’s Plants
For Problem Places also falls into this category; English
and invaluable.
Color in the Garden
Color is one of the most defining elements in the garden; I tend to find
myself thinking in terms of “blue/ yellow” or “hot”
colors or “soft” colors when devising garden schemes. The
two books I return to again and again are Modeste Herwig’s
Colorful Gardens and Color Echoes
by Pamela Harper. Both these books offer a full treatment of
the color theories and scientific view of color, but it is in the celebration
of color as the true medium of the garden arts that sets these two books
apart. I am particularly fond of Color Echoes for the way it
addresses the plants as colored parts that make the whole flower- I no
longer think of a Shasta daisy as a white flower. It is white and yellow
and green and all these colors can (and should) be contrasted and complimented.
My blurb on color would not be complete without mentioning The
Color Garden by Elvin McDonald. A set of four books
breaks the colors into blue, red, yellow, and white and gives a listing
of bulbs, annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees that mirror the chosen
color, I find myself using these in the “I need a two foot medium
blue for the partial shade” mode. Very handy, very pretty, little
books.
Adding a Theme
Perhaps you are looking for the book to help you conquer a particular
site challenge or create that specific theme. A good book for those looking
to include the whole family in the garden is Creating A Family
Garden by Bunny Guinness. As I just opened the
book to refresh the memory, a half hour sprang by as I perused the pages.
This book mesmerizes with the plethora of ideas for a family friendly
garden; no one is forgotten and the parents will be as pleased as
the kids with the ideas from this book. If you are interested in building
a garden specifically for your children that you can live in
(comfortably) too, this is your book. Often I hear customers talking about
screening out neighbors or unwanted views; Julia Fogg’s
Creating Privacy In The Garden addresses the
topic in a clear, concise manner that pauses at just the right places
to give distinct, professional advice in detail. Wished I’d written
it myself.
Interest in herb gardening seems to be on the rise again, and there are
a few books I fall back on again and again. The aptly named Herb
Garden Design by Ethne Clarke is an invaluable
collection of designs that one can imitate, but the underlying reason
and horticulture are explained is so that you can use certain features
as a baseline and improvise off them yourself; handy for beginner and
expert alike. Landscaping Herbs by Barbara
Collins and Floyd Giles is the book for those that will never have
a formal herb garden, but want herbs in the garden just the same. While
this is more of a plant by plant treatment (I almost put this with the
plant compendiums), its main focus is how to work these often forgotten
garden plants into the home landscape, and thus I feel it warrants inclusion
here.
A Road Map
To finally close out this section, I include a textbook on the subject.
Planting Design: A Manual of Theory and Practice
by William Nelson is probably the book you’d be using if
you took a college course on design (that is certainly its intent). It
gives a very good (if slightly dated) overview of the design process and,
for the budding designer, will provide a road map of what to look for
and/or avoid in designing the landscape in a professional manner. I found
the book to be a great help when I was starting out, but include it here
for the charts and tables in back, as they still have me pulling this
one off the shelf for help in finding the right plant for the right place.
For those who would become designers someday this is a must-have book.
Again this is not a complete listing of design books nor is it intended
as such. It is simply my favorites and books I am familiar with. IF you
find others that excite you please let me know (believe me, I’ll
read ‘em!)
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