Here are 100 books that Cultivating Delight fans have personally recommended if you like
Cultivating Delight.
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I’m not an expert gardener, but I’ve been gardening for half my life. Each spring I can’t wait to start all over again. I love deciding what vegetables to plant in our community garden and tucking flowers into the flower boxes. The perfect Saturday? Lingering at my local gardening center and perusing the seedlings at the farmer’s market—the possibilities are endless! As temperatures warm, I begin daily tours of my garden, looking for signs of life, pulling weeds, and tidying up. I marvel as the tulips bloom, scatter zinnia seeds, plant dahlia tubers, water, and wait. Gardening is perfectly predictable, yet I’m captivated by it every year.
I have a small, mostly shady city yard, but I still haven’t given up hope of growing food outside my back door.
That’s where Emily Tepe’s book The Edible Landscapecomes in. With lovely photographs of real gardens and step-by-step instruction, Tepe walks me through how to successfully grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers side-by-side to create a garden that is both beautiful and productive.
The best part of the book is Emily’s 10 favorite lists, featuring plants she loves and recommends.
As the fresh food revolution sweeps the nation, more and more people are seeking out delicious offerings from local growers. We have had our fill of tasteless, woody tomatoes from the far reaches of the globe and have begun tasting again—thanks to farmers’ markets and co-ops—the real flavors we remember from childhood. Inspired by these events, people have started growing food in the most unlikely places, including rooftops, abandoned parking lots, and tiny balconies and backyards on average city streets. Individuals and families are taking up the trowel and discovering that gardening can be fun, fulfilling, and, ultimately, delicious. Far…
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 not an expert gardener, but I’ve been gardening for half my life. Each spring I can’t wait to start all over again. I love deciding what vegetables to plant in our community garden and tucking flowers into the flower boxes. The perfect Saturday? Lingering at my local gardening center and perusing the seedlings at the farmer’s market—the possibilities are endless! As temperatures warm, I begin daily tours of my garden, looking for signs of life, pulling weeds, and tidying up. I marvel as the tulips bloom, scatter zinnia seeds, plant dahlia tubers, water, and wait. Gardening is perfectly predictable, yet I’m captivated by it every year.
Every spring, I pull this book from my shelf before heading over to the garden center or farmer’s market to pick out plantings for my window boxes.
I use the ideas in this book as a launch pad.
Sometimes I try to replicate exactly what appears in a window box design that catches my eye, but more often I just crib off a color scheme or copy the rhythm of showy flowered varieties paired with pretty leafy trailers.
I especially love that this book provides ideas for all seasons.
When design magazines want new and fresh ideas, they turn to James Cramer and Dean Johnson. In Window Boxes, Indoors & Out these two gardeners, designers, artists, and stylists bring a wealth of talent and the freshest eye to the close-up pleasures of window boxes. The book spans a year of invention and innovation at Seven Gates Farm, the authors' nineteenth-century homestead and studio. The results are inspired ideas, hard-working advice, and more than 150 dazzling photographs of these delightful still lifes.
Given four seasons in which to flourish, this once spring/summer-only pleasure goes well beyond traditional garden planters and…
My love and passion for embracing a cozy and romantic view of life is so strong that I built my entire business around it! I am a recipe developer, cookbook author, and content creator. My unique take on cooking and baking is by adding touches of fantasy, cottagecore, and history into my recipes and other creative work. This has led me to write all about living a more cozy lifestyle for the last 10 years! Romanticizing my life with the cottagecore aesthetic is how I find joy and comfort in a chaotic world, and I hope that can inspire others to embrace living their own magical lives!
Tasha Tudor, the original cottagecore icon, is the one of the first people I was inspired by to change my outlook on life and be brave enough to include elements of a historically inspired style into my life. I absolutely love this book for its romantic imagery and magical ideas for building a fairytale garden and home.
This book has inspired me again and again, especially to learn to embrace my own personal style and that it’s okay to be a bit odd. This book not only has beautiful photos, but it also shares practical tips and ideas for growing your own cozy cottage garden.
With each page, you enter Tasha’s nineteenth-century-inspired world that she built and feel the confidence to build your own version of a romantic cottage life.
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…
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 am an optimist. I jump out of bed in the morning ready to read and write. With my dog and cat by my side and a cup of coffee in hand, I lose myself in whatever I am working on. I am deeply curious about a gamut of subjects and constantly challenge myself to learn more. I am persistent and not afraid of hard work. Nature and animals are my bottomless well of inspiration and joy. I very much believe life is a journey and I try to enjoy each step.
It is a memoir where Barbara Kingsolver writes humorously about a year of living off the land. She is not a vegetarian but must raise, kill, and butcher animals if she wants to eat meat. The result is, every time she eats meat, she weighs the emotional cost.
This reckoning has been my bible. I ask myself, would I be willing to kill the chick I raised to eat? Inevitably, the answer is “no.”
The book is not a treaty encouraging people to live off the land, it’s the opposite. It makes you appreciate every bit of food you put in your mouth and the fact you did not have to grow, harvest, clean and cook it.
"We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles up right out of the ground."
Barbara Kingsolver opens her home to us, as she and her family attempt a year of eating only local food, much of it from their own garden. Inspired by the flavours and culinary arts of a local food culture, they explore many a farmers market and diversified organic farms at home and across the country. With characteristic warmth, Kingsolver shows us how to put food back at the centre of the political and family…
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,…
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…
We’re Chantal Gordon and Ryan Benoit — the cofounders of gardening/design/DIY blog The Horticult. Our site shows you how to create handsome yet effective habitats for your plants. That includes a collection of mounted staghorn ferns under our citrus trees, a vertical garden for your herbs, and a sleek bog for carnivorous pitcher plants. One of our most popular DIYs is how to build an outdoor theater behind your rosemary hedge. We show people how to create outdoor spaces they can deeply enjoy — whether it’s a patio, balcony, or yard. A key to welcoming someone is good design. The more you like hanging out outside, the better care you’ll take of your plants.
As primarily ornamental gardeners, we’ve fallen back on the old excuse about tomato plants being ugly as the reason why we don’t do edible gardening. It’s a lazy excuse! The Beautiful Edible Gardenshows that its titular premise is so not an oxymoron. And it hits the two things we look for most in a garden design book, which are: (1) hyperspecific plant recommendations and (2) solid design principles we can learn from and put into action. Through lucid, inviting instructions and scrumptious photos, The Beautiful Edible Gardenoffers gold like how to select “anchor plants” to establish structure in a landscape, blueberries and culinary sweet bay being top picks. And the transformational effect of planting a “focal point” plant — which has us hankering to bring in a persimmon tree.
Learn how to artfully incorporate organic vegetables, fruits, and herbs into an attractive garden design with this stylish, beautifully photographed guide.
We’ve all seen the vegetable garden overflowing with corn, tomatoes, and zucchini that looks good for a short time, but then quickly turns straggly and unattractive (usually right before friends show up for a backyard barbecue). If you want to grow food but you don’t want your yard to look like a farm, what can you do? The Beautiful Edible Garden shares how to not only grow organic fruits and vegetables, but also make your garden a place of…
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…
I ‘fell’ into being at sea by chance, through my father’s insistence I join him on a Scottish fishing boat for a week. I discovered I adored exploring unknown islands and lonely beaches, discovering wildlife and resilient small communities. In the 1990’s a female working amongst fishermen and commercial shipping was unknown, it was a wholly male, chauvinistic world. Using these skills I found a job being paid to explore – a dream job, pioneering but frequently lonely and dangerous. It resulted in my expanding the range and world of small expedition ships into areas with no infrastructure, unexplored and uncharted, lonely, empty coasts from the Arctic to Singapore.
I have loved travelling with Monty Don on this gentle, thoughtful, and evocative book is a joy.
In addition to his huge knowledge of plants, he is an informed historian, and writes beautifully. The book is full of surprises as he takes one meandering through the byways of France sharing his passion for plants, places, and interest in people which all come shining through.
This is not a book about French Gardens. It is the story of a man travelling round France visiting a few selected French gardens on the way.
Owners, intrigues, affairs, marriages, feuds, thwarted ambitions and desires, the largely unnamed ordinary gardeners, wars, plots and natural disasters run through every garden older than a generation or two and fill every corner of the grander historical ones. Families marry. Gardeners are poached. Political allegiances forged and shattered. The human trail crosses from garden to garden.
They sit in their surrounding landscape, not as isolated islands but attached umbilically to it, sharing the…
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…