Here are 100 books that Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life fans have personally recommended if you like
Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life.
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As a gardening instructor and designer, I've been recommending these five books for years. They were the core texts of the Fundamentals of Gardening course I've been teaching at the New York Botanical Garden for over a decade. Since the publication of The New Gardener’s Handbook, which covers all these topics in a more abbreviated way, I still recommend these five books to my students if they want to dig deeper. These books are what I call “keeper texts.” I own fewer and fewer actual gardening books these days, but it's a fact that a copy of each of these excellent resources resides on my office bookshelf where I refer to them frequently.
I’ve been recommending Brian Capon’s Botany for Gardenersto my gardening students for years. Unlike your typical botany textbook, it’s written expressly for gardeners, which means it presents all you need to know about botany if you are a gardener, not a scientist or a botany student. The presentation is clear, concise, and conversational, so it feels like learning about botany from a friend…a really smart friend! This book will either take you as far as you need to go in botany, or it will open you up to the world of botany and inspire you to learn more.
For two decades readers around the world have been fascinated by Brian Capon's crystal-clear descriptions of how plants work. What happens inside a seed after it is planted? How do plants use each other - and animals - to survive? How do they reproduce, and how do they transform nutrients into growth? "Botany for Gardeners" is the most complete, compact, and accessible introduction to the world of botany available. The new edition has been expanded with dazzling scanning electron microscope photographs and even more amazing facts about plants. Especially timely are new essays on food plants: what makes plants edible,…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
William Alexander’s best-selling gardening memoir, The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for a Perfect Garden has been praised for its fresh, humorous, and honest take on home gardening. The books he’s selected similarly break the mould for garden books, featuring rabid rose gardeners, an obsessive breeder, and a Czech playwright.
Gardening, whether in a backyard or a hundred-acre orchard, is an audacious attempt to improve on nature, and Smith’s fascinating hybrid of biography, history, and botany brings to life the most audacious of them all. The only biography on my list, I’ve included it because, in an age where we might be forgiven for thinking it takes millions of corporate dollars and genetic engineers to produce a new plant, The Garden of Invention reminds us how one man’s singular determination, patience, and brilliance can change the world. And produce the perfect potato for McDonald’s French fries.
The wide-ranging and delightful history of celebrated plant breeder Luther Burbank and the business of farm and garden in early twentieth- century America
At no other time in history has there been more curiosity or concern about the food we eat-and genetically modified foods, in particular, have become both pervasive and suspect. A century ago, however, Luther Burbank's blight-resistant potatoes, white blackberries, and plumcots-a plum-apricot hybrid-were celebrated as triumphs in the best tradition of American ingenuity and perseverance. In his experimental grounds in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank bred and cross-bred edible and ornamental plants-for both home gardens and commercial farms-until…
I’m a writer, artist, and historian, and I’ve spent much of my career trying to blow up the powerful American definition of environment as a non-human world “out there”, and to ask how it’s allowed environmentalists, Exxon, and the EPA alike to refuse to take responsibility for how we inhabit environments. Along the way, I’ve written Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America and "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA"; co-founded the LA Urban Rangers public art collective; and co-created the “Our Malibu Beaches” phone app. I currently live in St. Louis, where I’m a Research Fellow at the Sam Fox School at Washington University-St. Louis.
A self-critical and often hysterically funny account of what happens when you plant a garden to be “one with nature” and nature has other ideas. Still my favorite Pollan book (his first!), which is saying a lot. Favorite bit: his journey from “living in harmony” with a resident groundhog to an albeit ill-considered act of firebombing.
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
I love visiting other people’s gardens, great and small. There are many thousands throughout England but, as I surveyed the beauty of the lakes and rolling lawns of one of them, I was struck by a question: how much did it cost? I found that none of the huge number of books on gardening and garden history gave an answer, so (drawing on my experience as an economic historian) I had to try for myself. Fifteen years later, after delving in archives, puzzling out the intricacies of lakes and dams, exploring ruined greenhouses, peering into the bothies in which gardening apprentices lived, England’s Magnificent Gardens is my answer.
Gardening is indeed an obsession, which can drive men and women to madness and penury. It is fuelled by competition, the desire to have the latest, most exotic specimen. Andrea Wulf captures beautifully the mania for American plants which swept across English gardens in the 1700s, as the plant-hunter John Bartram of Virginia teamed up with the London merchant, Peter Collinson, to import boxes of plants and seeds into the UK. If they survived the long sea voyage, they were then nurtured by English aristocrats and their head gardeners, at vast expense, before becoming so common that few gardeners in Europe today know where they came from.
From the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature, a fascinating look at the men who made Britain the center of the botanical world.
“Wulf’s flair for storytelling is combined with scholarship, brio, and a charmingly airy style. ... A delightful book—and you don’t need to be a gardener to enjoy it.”—The New York Times Book Review
Bringing to life the science and adventure of eighteenth-century plant collecting, The Brother Gardeners is the story of how six men created the modern garden and changed the horticultural world in the process. It is a story of a garden revolution that began…
When I was studying plant science in graduate school, I realized that what I really wanted to do was not lab research but to help people understand plants better so they could grow more beautiful and bountiful gardens. To this end, I have written several books, founded the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), taught horticulture at City College of San Francisco for several decades, and, since 2006, written a column on gardening for the SF Chronicle. My list of books about gardening know-how will painlessly prepare you to grow plants well.
While you
will learn much about the nature and management of weeds from this book, you
will also find yourself painlessly learning the basics of botany-- the parts of
plants, how they live, how seeds evolved, how ecosystems evolve. While she
keeps weeds at bay, Stein favors a garden, as do I, in which the desirable plants
may self-sow a bit. It is a gardening philosophy that is current and can
produce lovely, serendipitous gardens.
The author of this work tells readers what weeds tell us about our gardens and the lives of all plants. She compares weeding tools and methods, and discusses the uses of weeds.
I’ve spent my life recreating myself as many times as Madonna. If things aren’t working, I move on to something new. I’ll go to classes, learn something else, change careers, and struggle the whole way as I look for pieces of life that fit the puzzle of me. It takes me a lot longer to read so when I try to diversify my bookshelf and don’t always stick to my genre (as the professionals tell an author to do). What I “stick to” is finding female characters who struggle and want to give up, but somehow, something deep inside them makes them move forward one step at a time.
Julia Henry’s third book in her Garden Squad Mysteries makes my list.
In Digging Up the Remains, Julia Henry brings readers a modern Jessica Fletcher with her character Lilly Jayne. Senior citizen Lilly is roommates with Delia, nearly forty years age difference! Somehow this works exquisitely for both of them. The rest of the characters span in age, but not in ethnicity, although there is small LGBT representation.
The theme of Digging Up the Remains is about secrets. The skeletons are in the closet so to speak.
Due to the contemporary setting this book’s way of showing the status of the journalism business is accurate. Now the world favors unsubstantiated, high-traffic live feeds of the “average” citizen hoping to get 15 minutes of fame and go viral.
A festive fall is in full swing in Goosebush, Massachusetts, but when a snoopy reporter is felled by foul play, it's up to Lilly and her Garden Squad to spook out a killer . . .
Between hosting a haunted house on her lawn, serving on the town's 400th Anniversary Planning Committee, and prepping for the Fall Festival's 10k fundraiser, Lilly's hands are full. She doesn't have time for prickly newspaper reporter Tyler Crane, who's been creeping around town, looking for dirt on Goosebush's most notable families . . . until he's found dead on the race route moments before…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
I grew up in a coastal landscape and aspired from childhood to read my way through it by knowing its plants. I once watched a master carver at work on a totem pole at a living museum and could relate the wood curls falling from his adze to the giant cedars growing at the site. As a university student, I worked in a botanical show garden, learning so much about the provenance of plants and what they tell us about geography, history, and beauty. These experiences, in childhood and early adulthood, formed my lifelong interest in ethnobotany, nomenclature, and mythology, explored through the lens of creative work.
As an avid reader of biography, I was thrilled to discover this brilliant saga of George Orwell’s life as a journalist and activist and the rose bushes he purchased from Woolworths and planted in 1936 in an English garden.
The roses are a tangible presence in his participation in the Spanish Civil War and his support for women’s suffrage, universal justice, and human rights. I deeply admire how Solnit follows Orwell’s influence as a gardener and a humanist through a world hungry for his integrity and clarity of thought.
'I loved this book... An exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times' Margaret Atwood
'Expansive and thought-provoking' Independent
Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening - George Orwell
Inspired by her encounter with the surviving roses that Orwell is said to have planted in his cottage in Hertfordshire, Rebecca Solnit explores how his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power.
Following his journey from the coal mines of England to taking up arms in the Spanish Civil War; from his prescient…
My seven novels all celebrate the natural world—while, I hope, telling a good story. Nature has always been my solace and delight. I’ve also had the honor of developing and directing an MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University, one of the few nationwide programs to focus on cutting-edge environmental writing. While I mainly write novels, I’m the author of two nonfiction books and one play and the editor of three environmental anthologies. When not writing or teaching, I can be found sauntering around the West, especially in my home state of Colorado. I love travel and adventuring, and I like looking at birds, stars, clouds, and sea glass.
Memoirs can be delightful, too, although they also have a bad rap for being depressing! This is one of my favorite Earth-based recent nonfiction reads. It focuses on the joys of gardening—even in a small suburban plot—and focuses on being a black gardener in a predominately white town.
The plants she grows are used as a metaphor to discuss cultural diversity, particularly in how we must cultivate diverse and intersectional language to protect our planet. Dungy is also the editor of an anthology entitled Black Nature, which covers decades of poetry by Black writers.
A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.
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…
A former microbiologist and attorney turned children’s book author, I’m delighted to advocate for children’s self-confidence and critical thinking skills in literature. I like to write about things that I know, to share my passion, and about things I don’t know—to learn more. Stories have been an escape and a learning tool for me and I want to share stories that do the same for children today.
This book has been continuously in print since 1945. That date is not a typo! The fact is that this book speaks across genders, races, and generations with the message of belief in oneself—even when everyone else tells you that you’re wrong. Children accustomed to the brightly colored illustrations in contemporary books may take a while to warm up to this gem, but this classic exploration of patience and the power of positive thinking deserves a shout-out. The garden theme works well for spring reading.
Celebrate 75 years of The Carrot Seed with a new foreword from Caldecott Honor picture book creator Kevin Henkes!
When a little boy plants a carrot seed, everyone tells him it won't grow. But when you are very young, there are some things that you just know, and the little boy knows that one day a carrot will come up. So he waters his seed, and pulls the weeds, and he waits...
This beloved classic celebrates patience, determination, and believing in yourself. First published in 1945 and never out of print, the timeless combination of Ruth Krauss's simple text and…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
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.
Many garden books are structured in a classic four-seasons pattern, but this one goes beyond, by delineating the gardening year as steps in the essence of all living beings—from conception in January, adulthood in July and August, to death in December. This clever and thoughtful approach celebrates the fact that we are all woven into the fabric of the natural world. Add to that the author’s lifetime of good gardening experience and advice, and this book shows readers in intimate detail how to work withnature, not against her.
For Margaret Roach gardening is more than a hobby, it's a calling. Her unique approach, which she refers to as "horticultural how-to and woo-hoo," is a blend of vital information to memorise (like how to plant a bulb) and intuitive steps gardeners must simply feel and surrender to. For more than twenty years Roach has shared her deep garden knowledge with an appreciative audience, first at Martha Stewart Living and now on her popular website and podcast. Now, with A Way to Garden, she explores how she and her way of gardening have changed over the years. Throughout, she shares…
