16 Books Like Kiss My Aster

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 Garden shows 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 Garden offers 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. 

What if your garden is completely indoors? This coffee table book encapsulates the #plantparenthood aesthetic (love it or hate it) of houseplants mobbed together and houseplants punctuating smooth, sunlit interiors. What gives Urban Jungle real cred though are its specific plant recommendations and care tips. It’s instructive to see what plants you can pair (or herd) together in similar spots — like an opuntia in a super-bright window paired with a huge Dracaena reflexa lurking five feet away. And indeed a fiddle-leaf fig, snake plant, kentia palm, Pilea peperomioides, schefflera, and spider plant all gathered together not only make sense light-wise but are an intriguing study in contrasting textures. It also inspired us to put a palm in front of a warmly colored accent wall.

Now that you know what plants to put where, it's time to explore how those plants will never stop playing with your emotions. Kincaid writes with incredible emotional precision about the gardens she’s designed and planted — evoking specific hybrids of buddleia and aster that’ll send you googling and giving words to the anxiety of a wisteria that’s blooming more than two months late. The pages of My Garden are peppered with Latin names and inspiring combos, like a banana tree in a pot “looking happy amid a background of plants alien to it” including evergreens and monkshood. These plants and design elements like ponds take us on flashbacks to Kincaid’s childhood and young adulthood, and yes, into the scourge of colonization that even the dahlia can’t escape.

One of the GOATs of garden design, Sackville-West wrote a gardening column in The Observer from 1947 to 1961, and those discursive, dishy columns are compiled in this book. Twelve chapters for twelve months make this massive topic easier to enter, but Sackville-West's unpretentious yet opinionated writing already hooks you instantly. In this book, you can conspire on a “green, grey, and white garden” and learn exactly what plants and hardscaping you need. In the May chapter, find a radical way to grow clematis (horizontally instead of vertically) with a quick DIY. Sackville-West argues for the design benefits of her recommendations (for the clematis, enjoying the upturned flowers without craning your neck). But knowing many of these principles were applied to the famed Sissinghurst garden is all the convincing we need. 

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 Landscape comes 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.

The author, who was for many years an extension urban horticulturist and associate professor at Puyallup Research and Extension Center, Washington State University, does gardeners a great service by taking on common garden myths about fertilizer, mulch, transplanting, staking, compost tea, watering and many more potentially confusing topics. In this and her subsequent books, she skillfully debunks myths with current research and her professional experience.

Well, thank god this book exists. It fills a huge gap—Joseph Paxton, an English architect, gardener, and engineer, as well as a lover of orchids—was everywhere, doing everything, in the 19th century United Kingdom! He built London’s Crystal Palace (cementing it as the first and possibly most grand World’s Fair in history) as well as directed all activities at Chatsworth (home to one of the world’s largest orchid collections in its time). The book shows us once again that the rich and powerful were not in complete control of the subtropical orchid trade—it took visionaries like Paxton to make them grow successfully in cold locations. I loved getting to know Paxton, his environs, and his relationships with all the well-known horticulturists and botanists of his age.

Rosalind Creasy is one of my heroes. It was she who first turned me on to heirloom fruits and vegetables over 30 years ago, when I read her newly published Cooking from the Garden. That seminal tome celebrates the food garden’s bounty and uses in cookery. 

Creasy is best known as a pioneer in the field of edible landscaping aka foodscaping: the practice of integrating edible plants into the landscape for beauty and sustenance. Think yummy delicious arbors, allées, groundcovers, borders, hedges, espaliers, foundation plantings, and potted plants. She spells out all the how-to’s, wheres, and whyfors in her first book, The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping; and updates it all in the second edition, Edible Landscaping. If you’re looking for practical advice, detailed instructions, design schemes, and recommended plants to feed body and soul, then allow me to point you in Ros’s direction.

I wanted to see what the park was planned to be in order to compare its original design with what it has become.

Brenwall gave me all of that preliminary background information in great detail, not just with her historical commentary but through the nineteenth-century maps and designs she shares. I took great pleasure in comparing Frederick Olmstead’s winning design with the many other possible layouts the park could have had.

What’s more, the book itself is beautiful. Urban planning has never looked so good.

This book reminds me of a spell in Boston, in my first job, and I acquired it then as I was eager to take the opportunity to explore its famous park system. This title was recommended to me as the main source of reference. I was immediately attracted to it because it was well-illustrated and with a direct, clear, and accessible text that explained the progress of the project.

To me, it provided a concise context and background for the park system that became prototypical as ‘the emerald necklace,’ not only in the USA but also internationally. I like the way it also addressed the theoretical development, the design process, down to the very detail of the project, in what remains one of the few such critical monographs of a single landscape concept.