Here are 100 books that A Way to Garden fans have personally recommended if you like
A Way to Garden.
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I’m a person who thinks gardening could be one of the most important endeavors anyone can do. I’m a writer, a speaker, and the recipient of eight Garden Communicators International media awards, including a Gold in 2021 for my column, “Rooting for You,” on the Hartley-Botanic Greenhouse website. My byline has appeared in numerous magazines such as Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Sunset, and This Old House. I’m always interested in great ideas for problem-solving in the garden.
To stop polluting our natural world with killer chemicals, gardeners have to know the good bugs from the bad, and how to effectively deal with the latter without harming the former. That’s where this book steps up with the latest effective information. It reveals the fascinating scope of which denizens are living among your plants and discusses assorted methods to encourage more of nature’s allies, who will, in turn, help eliminate the foes, and create a vital and sustainable balance.
In The Vegetable Garden Pest Handbook, you’ll find the simple, straightforward resources and tools you need to identify common pests of edible gardens and manage them without the use of synthetic chemical pesticides.
Climate change and newly introduced insect pests are changing the world of gardening. Pests that once produced a single generation per year are now producing two or even three, and accidentally imported pest insects have no natural predators to keep them in check. These leaf-munching critters can cause significant damage in short order, reducing your yields and costing you time and money, especially if your garden is…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’m a person who thinks gardening could be one of the most important endeavors anyone can do. I’m a writer, a speaker, and the recipient of eight Garden Communicators International media awards, including a Gold in 2021 for my column, “Rooting for You,” on the Hartley-Botanic Greenhouse website. My byline has appeared in numerous magazines such as Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Sunset, and This Old House. I’m always interested in great ideas for problem-solving in the garden.
I see this as a companion book to my own book. The scope is similar, but more basic and granular in its information, whether it’s explaining what a “last frost date” is or outlining DIY crafts for attracting pollinators. But the overall message is the same—all our growing efforts are linked. The actions we take and the choices we make are far-reaching beyond our own back fences. Nature’s interconnectedness is the power gardeners have to save the planet, garden by garden.
Homeowners are looking for actionable ways to help conserve the environment, and this hopeful, heartfelt guide offers them specific guidance on how to do so in their own home gardens. Want an easy, actionable way to reduce your contribution to emissions and food waste? Create your own climate victory garden. Garden plots in towns and cities are critical to supporting ecological diversity, and by instituting organic, regenerative practices and growing some of our own food, we can shift toward living in a more responsible way. In Grow Now, Emily Murphy, the founder of the popular website and podcast Pass the…
I’m a person who thinks gardening could be one of the most important endeavors anyone can do. I’m a writer, a speaker, and the recipient of eight Garden Communicators International media awards, including a Gold in 2021 for my column, “Rooting for You,” on the Hartley-Botanic Greenhouse website. My byline has appeared in numerous magazines such as Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Sunset, and This Old House. I’m always interested in great ideas for problem-solving in the garden.
Approximately eighty-three percent of folks in the U.S. live in cities. So, encouraging the greening of these artificial expanses is important to sustain us and all kinds of wildlife—birds, pollinators, even the soil biota. Consider this a gardening cookbook—with enticing recipes you’ll immediately want to go out and try. Whether it’s finding the space for growing, adding plants in an alley, or employing tactics to secure your fruits and flowers while living in close proximity with others, this book empowers readers to go out and garden, no matter where they live.
In The Urban Garden you’ll find dozens of inspiring and creative ways to grow flowers, shrubs, vegetables, herbs, and other plants in small spaces and with a limited budget.
Whether you want to grow on a balcony, rooftop, front stoop, or a tiny urban patio, turn your growing dreams into reality and build a gorgeous and unique garden that showcases your personal style while still being functional and productive. With the ingenious ideas and resourceful tactics found here, you’ll be maximizing yields and beauty from every square inch of your space, while also making a lush outdoor living area you’ll…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I’m a person who thinks gardening could be one of the most important endeavors anyone can do. I’m a writer, a speaker, and the recipient of eight Garden Communicators International media awards, including a Gold in 2021 for my column, “Rooting for You,” on the Hartley-Botanic Greenhouse website. My byline has appeared in numerous magazines such as Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Sunset, and This Old House. I’m always interested in great ideas for problem-solving in the garden.
If you want to save the natural world, you have to love it first. And to love it, you have to know it. This gorgeously illustrated picture book is an important introduction. Growencourages readers to be friends with fifteen common plants—from mint to orchids. Once recognized, and by learning a fascinating bit about them, these plants are no longer strangers, but companions. And that’s the beginning of love. The delightful drawings and fabulous plant factoids call for a read-aloud to younger children, or simply hand the book over to those already reading. This is an act of legacy—we need to bring along that next generation of passionate gardeners who will value our planet.
Discover 15 plants with incredible powers, then learn how to grow them. Meet each plant’s surprising relations (did you know the tasty tomato is a cousin of deadly nightshade?) and discover their history (bromeliads defended themselves against dinosaurs!). Then, follow the step-by-step instructions to grow and care for each plant, whether you have a big backyard or a sunny windowsill.
This fully illustrated guide to growing is the perfect introduction to plants for families everywhere.
California’s San Joaquin Valley is so congenial to plants I thought it made me a gardener. When I got my first job in a retail nursery I quickly realized how little I knew. Twenty years in the nursery trade expanded the depth and breadth of my garden skills. I owe my horticultural education to knowledgeable colleagues, an unending stream of interesting questions from nursery customers, and especially to Ed Laivo who introduced me to an ArcticGlo nectarine that commanded my attention.
For more than half a century theSunset Western Garden Book was the first and last word for Western gardeners. This compendium established a zonal system specifically for the nuanced West, and provided exhaustive, accurate, updated, and unbiased information, plant by plant, variety by variety, from A to Z. It offered a selection guide for specific situations suited to inland heat and the temperate coast. It provided basic information about planting, pests, soils, pruning, and weeds. I sold hundreds of copies of this indispensable volume to nursery customers. My co-workers did the same. That the sun has set on this essential field guide to gardening in the West is a bitter pill. Our Western gardens are diminished without it.
As surely as gardens change with the seasons, gardening is ever changing. New plants, techniques, materials, and lifestyles are constantly broadening the choices you have and reshaping the way you garden in the West. In response to this natural evolution, the editors of Sunset-the West's most trusted source of gardening information for more than 80 years-have completely redesigned and updated The Western Garden Book in this new 2012 Ninth Edition. Following the best-selling success of the previous editions of The Western Garden Book, this edition includes a fresh new look, thousands of color photographs, fresh illustrations, and an easy-to-follow format.…
I write children’s books, both fiction and non-fiction, including One Duck Stuck, Big Momma Makes the World, Rattletrap Car, Plant a Pocket of Prairie, and, in collaboration with Jacqueline Briggs Martin and Liza Ketchum, Begin With A Bee, a picture book about the federally endangered rusty-patched bumblebee. Recently I have been putting my garden to bed for the winter, pulling tomato vines, harvesting beans that have dried on the vine, cutting herbs, and planting cloves of garlic to grow into heads in next year’s garden. In a couple of months snow will bury the garden beds, and the only gardens will be in the pages of books. Here are five of the children’s books that I love about growing things.
Told in one long sentence, this is the story of a child and their dog who plant seeds after winter and wait and wait and wait for the brown ground to–finally–become green. The ongoing sentence resonates with waiting for hopeful signs that spring is on the way.
Following a snow-filled winter, a young boy and his dog decide that they've had enough of all that brown and resolve to plant a garden. They dig, they plant, they play, they wait . . . and wait . . . until at last, the brown becomes a more hopeful shade of brown, a sign that spring may finally be on its way.
Julie Fogliano's tender story of anticipation is brought to life by the distinctive illustrations Erin E. Stead, recipient of the 2011 Caldecott Medal.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m not an expert in gardening, forestry, or herbal medicine. But like everyone else, I have a growing awareness that our planet Earth is entirely dependent on thriving forests and insects and even weeds. We owe it to our children and future generations to learn about and protect our precious resources. Although I live in the big city of Chicago and have a tiny backyard, last year I turned my little grass lawn into prairie! I have creeping charlie, dandelions, creeping phlox, sedge grass, wild violets, white clover, and who knows what else. (Luckily, my neighbors are on board.) I’ve already seen honeybees and hummingbirds. It’s not much, but it’s something I can do.
Many of us tend to view gardens only from the surface up.
This book dives underground to show how many living things in the dirt are working hard to help us garden. Worms and insects that we might find “gross” are actually essential for airing the soil and warding off invaders.
Plenty of things grow just fine without human help because they have all the helpers they need under the earth. This book shows how nature goes about its business, plants and insects and animals all working together to green the earth.
Bonus: Neal’s illustrations are anatomical wonders, showing worms and bugs with legs and feelers in a friendly light. Squeamish children (and their parents) might make a few buggy friends as they read.
A companion to the new Over and Under the Pond and Over and Under the Snow, this sweet book explores the hidden world and many lives of a garden through the course of a year.
Up in the garden, the world is full of green-leaves and sprouts, growing vegetables, ripening fruit. But down in the dirt there is a busy world of earthworms digging, snakes hunting, skunks burrowing and all the other animals that make a garden their home. In this exuberant and lyrical book, discover the wonders that lie hidden between stalks, under the shade of leaves... and down…
I find these books most compelling because over the years I have become increasingly motivated to study and share the value of appreciating mankind’s responsibility to nature as God’s gift to us! And in doing so, have embraced our obligation as stewards to ensure future generations a “future Earth” cleaner than we found it. The current trend is faulty to the utmost degree, but can be reversed with intelligent design and appropriate education beginning in grade school. This should be everyone’s objective!
I loved this book as essential to all gardeners who would appreciate their "Zone-1" area closest to their home and kitchen to be as beautiful and productive as possible!
This book is the best that I have found for designing kitchen gardens, herb spirals, keyhole gardens, and general outdoor living areas. I also found it compelling that while symmetry and visual harmony were addressed liberally, the functionality of practical symbiosis for chosen fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers was not lost.
Discover how to partner ornamental plants with edible ones for a garden that offers both storybook appeal and a plethora of culinary delights.
*Winner of the GardenComm 2023 Laurel Media Awards Silver Award in the Book Publisher/Producer General Readership Category*
Stylish and celebratory, The Elegant and Edible Garden takes food growing to a higher plane. Host of The Potager Blog (@potagerblog), author and garden stylist Linda Vater, shares her vision for creating a garden space where food and flowers grow side by side. Known as a potager, these gardens are formal in their framework yet flexible and personal in their…
By Isa Hendry Eaton and Jennifer Blaise KramerAuthor
Why are we passionate about this?
We are garden designer Isa Hendry Eaton and lifestyle writer Jennifer Blaise Kramer, co-authors of Small Garden Style. We love getting and sharing inspiration on good garden design to pull our lives more outdoors. In our book, we show you how to use good design to create a joyful, elegant, and exciting yet compact outdoor living space for entertaining or relaxing. Our stylishly photographed guide is a fun way to create lush, layered, dramatic little gardens no matter the size of your available space, be it an urban patio, a tiny backyard, or even just a pot by your door.
As plant lovers who live in Santa Barbara, where succulents and aloes are ever-present, we love this book as it feels like a big authority on such a specific subject.
The book offers a crash course in choosing and planning succulents, and reading it makes even a novice feel like an expert. In addition to learning plant names and growing tips, Baldwin offers fun ideas like covering the top of a henhouse with low-maintenance plants.
Plus, the book is bursting with color, so every page is a visual thrill.
"Designing with Succulents is inspiring, practical, and complete-a treasure for any gardener who loves these otherworldly beauties." -Kathleen N. Brenzel, Sunset Succulents offer dazzling possibilities and require very little maintenance to remain lush and alluring year-round. No one knows them better than the Queen of Succulents, Debra Lee Baldwin. This new, completely revised edition of her bestselling classic is a design compendium that is as practical as it is inspirational. Designing with Succulents shares design and cultivation basics, hundreds of succulent plant recommendations, and 50 companion plant profiles. Lavishly illustrated with 400 photographs, you'll find everything you need to visualize,…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
By Isa Hendry Eaton and Jennifer Blaise KramerAuthor
Why are we passionate about this?
We are garden designer Isa Hendry Eaton and lifestyle writer Jennifer Blaise Kramer, co-authors of Small Garden Style. We love getting and sharing inspiration on good garden design to pull our lives more outdoors. In our book, we show you how to use good design to create a joyful, elegant, and exciting yet compact outdoor living space for entertaining or relaxing. Our stylishly photographed guide is a fun way to create lush, layered, dramatic little gardens no matter the size of your available space, be it an urban patio, a tiny backyard, or even just a pot by your door.
We love a garden book that works hard as a guide, and this book does just that!
It’s a handbook that feels like a trusted magazine with real-life garden tours and lifestyle tips such as “Steal This Look” (our fave!) for everything from stone and ironwork to plants and water features. We couldn’t appreciate more the way an author can break down a garden’s style and feel and help us replicate that look we love at home.
Gardenista is a go-to when we want a design refresh!
Our homes' outdoor spaces can and should be as welcoming and carefully considered as our living rooms; when treated as extensions of our homes, these spaces enrich our lives immeasurably. That was the guiding principle when, under the direction of editor in chief Michelle Slatalla (whose New York Times style columns were weekly must-reads for a decade), the team behind Remodelista.com launched sister site Gardenista.com. Like Remodelista, Gardenista caters to an older, more established audience (75 percent of readers are over the age of 35) and is known for its sophisticated, well-edited aesthetic. The book contains lushly photographed tours of…
