Think you can't have it all? Well, you can, at least in the garden, because many common food-producing plants also offer beautiful foliage or flowers. By simply following these creative suggestions, even novice gardeners can transform large or small spaces into high-yield gardens bursting with delicious, organically grown fruits, vegetables, and spectacular flowers. More than 90 color photographs, diagrams, and illustrations are provided, along with expert design and plant care tips. The invaluable advice on selecting and buying plants, creating attractive beds and borders, working with rocky or difficult soil, container gardening, and maximizing food production will ensure multi-season beauty and bounty.
Elevate your backyard veggie patch into a work of sophisticated and stylish art. Kitchen Garden Revival guides you through every aspect of kitchen gardening, from design to harvesting—with expert advice from author Nicole Johnsey Burke, founder of Rooted Garden, one of the leading US culinary landscape companies, and Gardenary, an online kitchen gardening education and resource company. Participating in the grow-your-own movement is important to both reduce your food miles and control what makes it onto your family’s table. If you’ve hesitated to take part because installing and caring for a traditional vegetable garden doesn’t seem to suit your life or your sense of style, Kitchen Garden Revival is here to show you there’s a better, more beautiful way to grow food. Instead of row after row of cabbage and pepper plants plunked into a patch of dirt in the middle of the yard, kitchen gardens are attractive, highly tailored food gardens consisting of easy-to-maintain raised planting beds laid out in an organized geometric pattern. Offering both four seasons of ornamental interest and plenty of fresh, homegrown fruits, vegetables, and herbs, kitchen gardens are the way to grow your own food in a fashionable, modern, and practical way. Kitchen gardens were once popular features of the European and early American landscape, but they fell out of favor when our agrarian roots were displaced by industrialization. With this accessible and inspirational guide, Nicole aims to return the kitchen garden to its rightful place just outside of every backdoor. Learn the art of kitchen gardening as you discover: What characteristics all kitchen gardens have in common How to design and install gorgeous kitchen garden beds using metal, wood, or stone Why raised beds mean reduced maintenance What crops are best for your kitchen garden A planting, tending, and harvesting plan developed by a pro Season-by-season growing guides It's time to join the Kitchen Garden Revival and start growing your own delicious, organic food.
By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909–2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, Mississippi. From the beginning, Eudora wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that the images were drawn directly from her passionate connection to and abiding knowledge of her own garden. Near the end of her life, Welty still resided in her parents' house, but the garden—and the friends who remembered it—had all but vanished. When a local garden designer offered to help bring it back, Welty began remembering the flowers that had grown in what she called “my mother's garden.” By the time Welty died, that gardener, Susan Haltom, was leading a historic restoration. When Welty's private papers were released several years after her death, they confirmed that the writer had sought both inspiration and a creative outlet there. This book contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty's private correspondence about the garden. The authors of One Writer's Garden also draw connections between Welty's gardening and her writing. They show how the garden echoed the prevailing style of Welty's mother's generation, which in turn mirrored wider trends in American life: Progressive-era optimism, a rising middle class, prosperity, new technology, women's clubs, garden clubs, streetcar suburbs, civic beautification, conservation, plant introductions, and garden writing. The authors illustrate this garden's history—and the broader story of how American gardens evolved in the early twentieth century—with images from contemporary garden literature, seed catalogs, and advertisements, as well as unique historic photographs. Noted landscape photographer Langdon Clay captures the restored garden through the seasons.
“Fresh and original . . . full of lush writing and detailed worldbuilding . . . [with a] rich fantasy landscape and an almost Shakespearean feel.”—Paste Twins imbued with incredible magic and near-immortality will do anything to keep their family in power—even if it tears the family apart—in the first book of a mythic epic fantasy duology from the New York Times bestselling author of Wilder Girls. ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—BookPage Rhea and Lexos were born into a family unlike any other. Together with their siblings, they control the seasons, the tides, and the stars, and help their father rule their kingdom. Thanks to their magic, the family has ruled for an eternity, and plan to rule for an eternity more. But Rhea and Lexos are special: They are twins, bonded down to the bone, and for the past hundred years, that bond has protected them as their father becomes an unpredictable tyrant—and his worsening temper threatens the family’s grip on power. Now, with rival nations ready to attack, and a rebel movement within their own borders, Rhea and Lexos must fight to keep the kingdom—and the family—together, even as treachery, deceit, and drama threaten to strand the twins on opposite sides of the battlefield. In a Garden Burning Gold is a vividly written, atmospheric saga that explores the limits of power and the bonds of family—and how far both can be bent before they break.
In a bustling, urban neighborhood, count the ways one little lot becomes a beautiful community vegetable garden. Count all the ways (one to ten) an urban community unites to clean up an abandoned lot. From building planter boxes to pulling weeds to planting seeds, everyone works together to transform the lot into a bountiful vegetable garden. As the garden grows, strangers become friends, eventually sharing in a special feast with the harvest they grew.
“A Way to Garden prods us toward that ineffable place where we feel we belong; it’s a guide to living both in and out of the garden.” —The New York Times Book Review For Margaret Roach, gardening is more than a hobby, it’s a calling. Her unique approach, which she calls “horticultural how-to and woo-woo,” is a blend of vital information you need to memorize and intuitive steps you must simply feel and surrender to. In A Way to Garden, Roach imparts decades of garden wisdom on seasonal gardening, ornamental plants, vegetable gardening, design, gardening for wildlife, organic practices, and much more. She also challenges gardeners to think beyond their garden borders and to consider the ways gardening can enrich the world. Brimming with beautiful photographs of Roach’s own garden, A Way to Garden is practical, inspiring, and a must-have for every passionate gardener.
"Gardening is the most basic of languages, the labor from which we're all born and nourished. . . ." In these pages, we travel the country with Debra Landwehr Engle as she visits 20 gardens and gardeners from California to Maine and Minnesota to Arkansas, showing us that grassroots campaigns actually can and do involve roots--and seeds and garden trowels. That any person with a steadfast resolve and an open patch of dirt can help bridge the gap between multinational refugees. That lush vegetation and running water and cool stones can help spark the fading memories of our elderly. And that our children can learn about where food comes from, labyrinths, wetlands systems, and healing from grief and loss just by digging in the earth with a caring adult hand to guide them. As the stories in this remarkable collection demonstrate, the simplest act of gardening can produce significant changes in the lives of people we might never even meet. Consider the man who sends seedlings and greenhouses halfway around the world to feed hospital patients, or the immigrant woman who began selling her own flowers as a way to raise money for overseas charities, or the couple who offers their land as a midday retreat for the residents of nearby nursing homes. These acts and others are not heroic--or even unusual--as Ms. Engle tells us. We see ourselves in these uplifting tales from the garden, as they inspire us to transform our own little parts of the world into places of greater peace, repose, play, and healing. For gardeners, community activists, and those who understand the spiritual value of putting a spade in the soil, these stories capture the promise renewed each time we plant a seed and give us fresh ideas for changing the world, one garden at a time.
From the Booker Prize winner and national bestselling author, reflections on gardening, art, literature, and life Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden to Sissinghurst and into her own backyard, traversing the lives of writers like Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin while imparting her own sly and spare wisdom. "Her body of work proves that certain themes never go out of fashion," writes the New York Times Book Review, as true of this beautiful volume as of the rest of the Lively canon. Now in her eighty-fourth year, Lively muses, "To garden is to elide past, present, and future; it is a defiance of time."
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.
How women changed the American landscape from planting war victory gardens to saving the redwoods, beautifying the highway to creating horticultural standards. In 1904, Elizabeth Price Martin founded the Garden Club of Philadelphia. In 1913, twelve garden clubs in the eastern and central United States signed an agreement to form the Garden Guild. The Garden Guild would later become the Garden Club of America (GCA), now celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2013. GCA is a volunteer nonprofit organization comprised of 200 member clubs and approximately 18,000 members throughout the country. Comprised of all women, GCA has emerged as a national leader in the fields of horticulture, conservation, and civic improvement. As an example, in 1930, GCA was a key force in preserving the redwood forests of California, helping to create national awareness for the need to preserve these forests, along with contributing funds to purchase land on which they stood. The Garden Club of America Grove and the virgin forest tract of Canoe Creek contain some of the finest specimens of the redwood forests. The Garden Club of America is a centennial celebration of strong women who nurtured the country, helped spread the good word of gardening, and continue to plant seeds of awareness.
