100 Books Like Margarito's Forest

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.

This joyful book about the life cycle of a dandelion will have you on the edge of your seat!

I’m not kidding – suspense and humor pervade the tale, which takes our dandelion from an unlikely sprouting in a city sidewalk to adventures and tragedy in the countryside (being trampled by a moose!), to the ecstasy and triumph of a final scattering of its millions of little seeds.

What child hasn’t blown on the fluffy ball of dandelion seeds? Understanding where the seeds come from and where they’re going is a life lesson worth learning about this special indigenous plant too often dismissed as a “weed.”

Barbara Chotiner’s chaotic and evocative illustrations will bear up under many repeated readings.

When I take the time to really look at a rock and contemplate the journey that brought it to me, I am humbled. I’m reminded that I’m a small part of something bigger, an experience shared by the characters in this gorgeous picture book about rocks, intergenerational relationships, and Indigenous knowledge.

In Where Wonder Grows, Grandma leads her granddaughters to a special garden, and together they explore a collection of rocks. Grandma encourages the girls to look closely at each rock and to think about how it formed and all it has been through. She helps the girls see that rocks are “alive with wisdom” and that nature is full of wonder. 

Everyone feels lost like Jayden at one time or another: His family has moved from the excitement and color of New York City to the vast, empty desert of New Mexico, where at first all Jayden sees and hears are shadows and silence. How can this ever be home?

But very quickly the desert reveals its glorious sounds and colors. Nikki Grimes’s spare, quiet text does a beautiful job of reminding us that nature is everywhere if we only take the time to look, and that finding comfort and joy in the beauty around us can help make any place a home.

I’ve been recommending Brian Capon’s Botany for Gardeners to 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. 

This is a very slim volume by the Czech novelist, playwright, and essayist who gave us the word “robot” in a play in 1921. In this book, Capek takes readers through a year, month by month, in his backyard garden in Prague. The writing is full of humor, the tone conversational, with observations that resonate with all gardeners–from the fickleness of the weather to the pleasures of reading plant catalogues in the winter. But the true subject of Capek’s musing is the complexity of human nature. For the writer, the garden is a metaphor for what makes us human. It is ultimately a very hopeful book, and Capek ends it with these words: “The right, the best is in front of us. Each successive year will add growth and beauty. Thank God that again we shall be one year farther on!”  

Monty Don's narration in this book truly brought my garden to life. His poetic descriptions of the seasons, garden designs, and plant types were highly informative and inspiring.

I was particularly impressed with his depth of knowledge and the way plant names rolled off his tongue so beautifully. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for gardening inspiration.

Any reading on nature spirits has to include a book or two from the Findhorn community or Dorothy Maclean - one of its founders and plant spirit communicator. I recommend this one as it contains not only insights from many plant devas and landscape devas, but a broad overview of the formation of the Findhorn Community itself - which occurred in direct communication and cocreation with the plant devas themselves. A fascinating and eye-opening read. 

A slightly more left-field choice in some ways since this book, as the title suggests, is a history, rather than a memoir, but it gave me such an uplifting sense of the permanence and longevity of nature, that I felt I had to include it.

It reinforced the sense that the natural world has existed way before we have and will go on long after we’ve disappeared. Just reading about the passion, dedication, and enthusiasm of gardeners down the ages too, provided an instant tonic.

If, like me, you’re a history buff, it’s also full of fascinating insights on how natural spaces down the centuries have acted as the social, romantic, and economic bedrocks of communities; how they’ve supported, reinvigorated, and given sustenance to so many different people over time.

Comforting, entertaining, and informative all at once.

If you love flowers and love to garden, do not miss this book by British poet James Fenton.  Grab your seed catalogs and make a list of the hundred flowers you would grow, then compare your choices to James Fenton’s. I found it the perfect book to read during those gray days of winter, his bright prose radiating like an injection of sunshine. Fenton romps through the world of flower color: the orange of nasturtiums and Mexican sunflower, the lemon yellow evening primroses, and California bluebells “the colour of blue poster paint.” He captures his century of blooms with a poet’s pen. I didn’t want it to end.