|
Garden Appreciation Non-Fiction:
|
|
|
Why we garden : the art, science, philosophy and joy of gardening
by Claire Masset
''Whether you seek sanctuary in your potting shed, find paradise amongst your patio plants, or enjoy the simply solace of your hands in the soil, there is beauty, peace, and happiness to be found for every gardener in this thoughtful and entertaining collection. Both a hymn to gardening and a call to action, this down-to-earth guide is worth a hundred how-tos. Wander the gardens of Giverny with Monet to create your own beautiful masterpiece or, like George Orwell, reap the joy to be found in the work of an allotment. Discover the soothing symmetry in the spiral of sunflower seeds, or, like William Morris, provide a wild abundance of floral habitat for the natural visitors to your garden. Drawing inspiration from gardening greats--from the ancient Greek and French philosophers Epicurus and Voltaire, via the wisdom of Margery Fish and Gertrude Jekyll, to Monty Don and modern-day guerrilla gardeners--this beautifully illustrated compilation is a thoughtful gift for any gardener''
|
|
|
The joy of exploring gardens
by Kate Armstrong
"Discover 180 of the world's most astounding gardens and ignite a love of outdoor spaces with this joyful book featuring fascinating insights from local voices, beautiful photography, maps and trip planning tips. Explore the restorative effects of flora and fauna and learn how each exquisite garden can bring joy and enrichment to your life"
|
|
|
The Virago Book of Women Gardeners
by Deborah Kellaway
The Virago Book of Women Gardeners From diggers and weeders, to plantswomen and landscape designers, women have contributed greatly to the world of gardening. This book contains collected extracts from the 18th century to the present day, from writers including Colette, Germaine Greer, Vita Sackville-West, and Dorothy Wordsworth
|
|
|
To stand and stare : how to garden while doing next to nothing
by Andrew Timothy O'Brien
"In To Stand and Stare, Andrew Timothy O'Brien weaves together strands of botany, philosophy and mindfulness to form an ecological narrative suffused with practical gardening know-how. Informed by a deep understanding and appreciation of natural processes, O'Brien encourages the reader to think from the ground up, as we follow the pattern of a plant's growth through the season--roots, shoots, flowers, and fruits--while advocating an increased awareness of our surroundings"
|
|
Garden Inspiration: Non Fiction
|
|
|
New wild garden : natural-style planting and practicalities
by Ian Hodgson
"New Wild Garden combines new approaches to a more naturalistic design with the practical side of growing wildflowers and shows how to incorporate wildflowers, real meadows and a looser meadow-style planting into gardens and wild spaces. With serious concern into the decline of pollinators and habitats, meadows are currently the focus of enormous creativity. Gardeners, wildlife lovers, professional designers and seed manufacturers are all pushing the envelope of what can be grown, the pictorial effects that can be achieved, and the benefits that this provides for gardeners and wildlife. This book includes 15 step-by-step projects and an essential plant list, as well as offering inspiration to gardeners and an overview of the most influential movement in garden design over recent decades"
|
|
|
Creating a garden retreat : an artist's guide to planting an outdoor sanctuary
by Virginia Johnson
"A garden is more than the sum of its parts-a garden can be anything one wants it to be. What's important is that it have a heart. Through ethereal illustrations, textile designer and artist Virginia Johnson takes the reader on her own garden journey, from blank slate to dreamscape. Over the years, she has transformed a small, narrow city lot into a garden that is personal, carefree, wild, and welcoming. It all began with a fence to allow her children to play freely but safely, and over the years has turned into a city-dweller's "secret garden." Hornbeams, with their elegant shape, are the heroes of her garden, and the overall palette reflects an artist's lens-peonies, hollyhocks, roses, and hydrangeas abound. Johnson explains her process with ease and clarity, bringing her ideas to life through words and illustrations so that readers can be encouraged and empowered to start their own garden journeys. The book is organized into clear chapters-Trees & Shrubs; Vines; Flowers; Seasons; Edibles; and more"
|
|
|
Moon garden : a guide to creating an evening oasis
by Jarema Osofsky
"A guide to designing and planting a moon garden" An enchanting guide to creating a moon garden, plus soothing rituals to practice in your night-blooming oasis.
Moon gardens are green spaces that come alive at night, with plants that reflect moonlight, attract nocturnal creatures, and release scent after sundown. Though beautiful during the day, they're best experienced in the evenings--perfect for anyone who works nine-to-five and wants to unwind in their garden after a long day.
|
|
|
The Naturally Beautiful Garden : Designs That Engage With Wildlife and Nature
by Kathryn Bradley-Hole
It seems that almost everyone who has access to outside space, however small or large, wants to make the most of it. Interest in growing plants in ecologically sensitive ways that support pollinators, butterflies, birds, and other wildlife is a very strong strand in the new consciousness of garden making. It goes hand in hand with organic principles that shun the use of short-term, quick-fix chemical solutions that have an overall damaging effect on soil and the environment.
As the gardens in this book demonstrate, there need be no loss of visual impact or creativity when taking environmental concerns into account. With examples from all over the world, the gardens showcased here serve diverse needs--from twenty-first-century public green spaces to modern cottage gardens and from large country gardens to intimate city courtyards--across a wide range of climates and soils. They have been created with elegance and style, alongside their makers' efforts to work with, rather than against, nature and support the complex web of life that so frequently struggles to coexist with human habitation or agriculture.
Interspersed throughout are illustrated essays outlining relevant topics, including: supporting wildlife; the challenges of seaside gardening; incorporating seeds and fruit; grasses, meadows, and prairie plantings; coping with heat and drought; and the important role of trees.
Featuring more than thirty gardens from across the globe with photographs by leading garden photographers, including Richard Bloom, Andrea Jones, Marianne Majerus, Alessio Mei, Clive Nichols, and Ngoc Minh Ngo, the book showcases the beauty and visual impact produced by ecologically friendly garden design principles. As the world wakes up to the effects of climate change and the consequent strains on natural resources, today's garden makers are responding in creative way.
|
|
Garden Stories: Non-Fiction
|
|
|
Second nature : a gardener's education
by Michael Pollan
The author of The Botany of Desire draws on his gardening experiences to explore attitudes toward nature and wilderness, environmental questions, and what gardening teaches about the borders between nature and culture.
|
|
|
The Garden Against Time : In Search of a Common Paradise
by Olivia Laing
Named one of the most anticipated books of 2024 by the BBC, The Observer, Irish Times, The Guardian, and The Millions.
Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, “imaginative and empathetic critic” (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise. In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an 18th century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
|
|
|
All My Wild Mothers
by Victoria Bennett
'Lyrical and beautiful and feels like a haven in a cynical world - exactly the book we all need to read right now' Catherine Simpson, author of One Body: A Retrospective, When I Had A Little Sister and Truestory
'A book of passionate resistance to everything in modern life that wants us to stay neat and small and fearful' Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure For Sleep
An intimate weaving of memoir and herbal folklore, All My Wild Mothers is a story of rewilding our wastelands and the transformation that can happen when we do.
At seven months pregnant, Victoria Bennett was looking forward to new motherhood and all that was to come. But when the telephone rang, the news she received changed everything. Her eldest sister had died in a canoeing accident.
Five years later, struggling with grief, the demands of being a parent-carer for her young son, and the impact of deeper austerity, life feels very different to the future she had imagined. A move to a new social housing estate in rural Cumbria offers Victoria and her family a chance to rebuild their lives. Constructed over an industrial site, at first the barren ground seems an unlikely place to sow the seeds of a new life.
She and her son set about transforming the rubble around them into a wild apothecary garden. Daisy, for resilience. Dandelion, for strength against adversity. Red campion, to ward off loneliness. Sow thistle, to lift melancholy. Borage, to bring hope in dark and difficult times.
Stone by stone, seed by seed, All My Wild Mothers is the story of how sometimes life grows, not in spite of what is broken, but because of it.
'An exciting new voice in nature writing' Cal Flyn, Sunday Times Writer of the Year, and author of Islands of Abandonment and Thicker Than Water
|
|
|
Soil : the story of a Black mother's garden
by Camille T. Dungy
"In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it"
|
|
|
The Grove : A Nature Odyssey in 19 ½ Front Gardens
by Ben Dark
'The best gardening book of 2022.' The Telegraph
'A book to make even a quick trip to the corner shop endlessly fascinating. Dark has been dubbed the millennial Monty Don for this beautifully written study of the oft-overlooked nature on our doorsteps...Dark teases the drama, humour and history from even the most commonplace buddleja, box and tulip.' George Hudson, Evening Standard, Favourite Gardening Books of the Year
'This enjoyable read throws a spotlight on the everyday.' Rachel De Thame's 10 Best Gardening Books of 2022, the Sunday Times
'Gardening for a billionaire taught Ben Dark that "plants alone are not enough to make a garden special". Instead he finds "special" in the people and the history, as well as the plants, that fill 19½ London front gardens. A soulful read. Tom Howard, RHS The Garden, Best Books of The YearBook Annotation
|
|
|
Sitting in the shade : from ten years of Trad's diary
by Hugh Johnson
"For many years Hugh Johnson has written a garden diary (initially as the editorial column of the RHS Journal and, since 2008, as a blog). Free to turn his attention to whatever is happening in the natural world at that time, or simply something that piques his interest, his subjects are as diverse as London's trees, the first crocus of spring, the joys of a greenhouse and what cyanide has to do with a robin's choice of berries. Month by month, Hugh's beautiful, evocative writing is filled with an eclectic mixture of topical, whimsical and humorous anecdotes that will delight not only gardeners but anyone with an interest in nature in all its manifestations"
|
|
|
A Fenland Garden : Creating a Haven for People, Plants & Wildlife
by Francis Pryor
Fenland Garden is the story of the creation of a garden in a complex and fragile English landscape—the Fens of southern Lincolnshire—by a writer who has a very particular relationship with landscape and the soil, thanks to his distinguished career as an archaeologist and discoverer of some of England's earliest field systems. It describes the imagining, planning and building of a garden in an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile place, and the challenges, setbacks and joys these processes entail. This is a narrative of the making of a garden, but it is also about reclaiming a patch of ground for nature and wildlife—of repairing the damage done to a small slice of Fenland landscape by decades of intensive farming. A Fenland Garden is informed by the empirical wisdom of a practicing gardener (and archaeologist) and by his deep understanding of the soil, landscape and weather of the region; Francis's account of the development of the garden is counterpointed by fascinating nuggets of Fenland lore and history, as well as by vignettes of the plantsman's trials and tribulations as he works an exceptionally demanding plot of land.
|
|
|
The Potting Shed Murder
by Paula Sutton
Welcome to the sleepy village of Pudding Corner, a quintessentially English haven of golden cornfields, winding cobbled lanes … and murder.
Daphne Brewster has left London behind and is settling into her family’s new life in rural Norfolk, planting broad beans in raised beds and vintage hunting for their farmhouse.
But when the local headmaster is found dead in his potting shed, amongst his allotment cabbages, the village is ablaze: Who would kill beloved Mr Papplewick, pillar of the community? Daphne soon comes to realise perhaps the countryside isn’t so idyllic after all…
When the headmaster’s widow points her finger at Minnerva, Daphne’s new friend, Daphne vows to clear her name. Sneaking into the crime scene and chasing down rumours gets her into hot water with the local inspector – until she comes across a faded photograph that unearths a secret buried for forty years…
They say nothing bad ever happens in close-knit Pudding Corner, but Daphne is close to the truth – dangerously close…
There’s death amongst the dahlias… A truly unputdownable whodunnit by Paula Sutton – otherwise known as Instagram’s happiest influencer: Hill House Vintage, the queen of cottagecore – an unforgettable new voice in cosy crime. Perfect for fans of Richard Osman, Janice Hallett and Richard Coles.
|
|
|
Old Herbaceous
by Reginald Arkell
“Old Herbaceous,” they called him when they thought he wasn’t listening. But crusty Bert Pinnegar, head gardener at the Manor, didn’t care what liberties they took. His first love had always been his lady’s garden, throughout his eighty years on God’s green earth; and if he had made it a little greener, why, that was all that mattered.This is the story of a gardener, from the day when he won a prize for wild flowers at the village show, to the day when he himself was judging flower shows all over the county; from the day when he refused to follow his schoolmates to a job as a farmhand and won the post of garden boy at the Big House, to the day when he could sit back among his cushions in his little cottage and criticize the younger generation’s attitude towards tulips.Old Herbaceous is more than a story of gardeners and gardening. Times changed in England, and even a village institution like Old Herbaceous found himself—the symbol of a more gracious era—with no place to go; for even gardens can change hands.Anyone who loved the England of Goodbye Mr. Chips and Mrs. Miniver will love Mr. Arkell’s England, too. But the central character is not peculiar to the English countryside; wherever there is a garden, there you will find Old Herbaceous.“Old Herbaceous is delightful. A book to warm the heart of anyone who loves earth or gardens!"—Loui Bromfield“Old Herbaceous is enchanting—fresh as an English spring, fragrant as sweet lavender!”—A. J. Cronin“
|
|
|
The forgotten garden : a novel
by Kate Morton
On her twenty-first birthday they tell her the truth, and with her sense of self shattered and with very little to go on, "Nell" sets out on a journey to England to try to trace her story, to fi nd her real identity. Her quest leads her to Blackhurst Manor on the Cornish coast and the secrets of the doomed Mountrachet family. But it is not until her granddaughter, Cassandra, takes up the search after Nell's death that all the pieces of the puzzle are assembled. At Cliff Cottage, on the grounds of Blackhurst Manor, Cassandra discovers the forgotten garden of the book's title and is able to unlock the secrets of the beautiful book of fairy tales.
This is a novel of outer and inner journeys and an homage to the power of storytelling. The Forgotten Garden is fi lled with unforgettable characters who weave their way through its spellbinding plot to astounding effect. .
|
|
|
The victory garden
by Rhys Bowen
Marrying an Australian pilot during World War I, Emily volunteers to tend the neglected grounds of a Devonshire estate where she finds inspiration and support in an herbalist's long-forgotten journals. By the award-winning author of The Tuscan Child
|
|
|
Date with poison
by Julia Chapman
Julia Chapman's fifth Dales Detectives Agency novel, Date With Danger, sees our intrepid leads Samson and Delilah on the trail of a sheep rustler turned killer. A heartwarming cosy crime caper, perfect for fans of Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club and M.C. Beaton.
Spring is in the air in the Yorkshire Dales, but not everyone is filled with the joys of the season.
Full of wit, warmth and characters you'll care about, continue the charming mystery series with Date with Danger.
|
|
|
The Cherokee rose : a novel of gardens and ghosts
by Tiya Miles
"Conducting research for her weekly history column, Jinx, a free-spirited Muscogee (Creek) historian, travels to Hold House, a Georgia plantation originally owned by Cherokee chief James Hold, to uncover the mystery of what happened to a tribal member who stayed behind after Indian removal, when Native Americans were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homelands in the nineteenth century. At Hold House, she meets Ruth, a magazine writer visiting on assignment, and Cheyenne, a Southern Black debutanteseeking to purchase the estate. Hovering above them all is the spirit of Mary Ann Battis, the young Indigenous woman who remained in Georgia more than a century earlier. When they discover a diary left on the property that reveals even more about the house's dark history, the three women's connections to the place grow deeper. Over a long holiday weekend, Cheyenne is forced to reconsider the property's rightful ownership, Jinx reexamines assumptions about her tribe's racial history, and Ruth confronts her own family's past traumas before surprising herself by falling into a new romance. Imbued with a nuanced understanding of history, The Cherokee Rose brings the past to life as Jinx, Ruth, and Cheyenne unravel mysteries with powerful consequences for them all"
|
|
|
|
|
|