It’s the season for planting and now is the time to get your garden beds ready! We have the latest books to help you get a head start.
The Flower Yard In Containers & Pots: Creating Paradise Season By Season by Arthur Parkinsons ~ This lushly photographed idea book proves that it is possible to create a glamorous outdoor space of ever-changing color, teeming with life, in the smallest of spaces, whether a patio, terrace, or front porch. This inspirational guide demonstrates how a glorious outdoor space is possible, even with only a small patio and a few pots. Featuring detailed photos and text by Parkinson who has been named a rising gardening star by Architectural Digest, this new book is the key to success with container gardening. Parkinson shows how to create a veritable paradise in pots with aspirational season-by-season ideas that are easy to replicate in any situation. The emphasis is on creating a small haven for birds, butterflies, and other wildlife—from flowers for pollinators to small fruiting shrubs that provide winter sustenance for birds. Even an upturned pot can create a welcoming space for a mosquito-eating frog. The book is filled with planting and propagating advice, tips on improving soil, seasonal tasks, and suggested planting ideas that include both flowering and edible plants for a vibrant backyard oasis. This is container gardening at its most romantic and stylish.
The Garden Maker’s Book of Wonder by Allison Vallin Kostovick ~ Drawing on decades of gardening experience, and illustrated with vibrant photography from her own home and garden, popular gardening lifestyle influencer Allison Vallin Kostovick offers sage advice on growing bountiful harvests of favorite vegetables, herbs, and flowers.
The Ultimate Flower Gardener’s Guide: How To Combine Shape, Color, And Texture To Create The Garden Of Your Dreams by Jenny Rose Carey ~ The book proposes a holistic approach to flower gardening, with a refreshing difference: instead of concentrating primarily on color, it brings flower shape to the fore, which results in a more aesthetically pleasing result. The featured plants include both perennials and annuals, and have been chosen for their ease of care, attractiveness to pollinators, and environmental friendliness. Emphasis is also placed on seasonal succession, the long-term evolution of the flower bed, and organic gardening practices. In short, the book provides a complete road map to a successful, satisfying flower gardening.
The Month-By-Month Gardening Guide by Franz Bohmig ~ This is a compendium of practical advice for the home gardener, arranged by month. The individual bits of advice for each month are arranged as follows: general advice; advice for the vegetable garden (including herbs); and advice for ornamental plants (further subdivided into the outdoor garden, terrace and balcony, and windowsill and houseplants). There is also a massive section of charts at the back of the book. The advice is applicable to U.S. gardens in Zones 4-8, and is supplemented by helpful, accurate line drawings. The breadth of information presented is truly encyclopedic-every topic that a home gardener could possibly be interested in is presented somewhere in the book’s pages.
365 Days of Colour in Your Garden by Nick Bailey ~ A beautifully photographed guide for gardeners keen to attain the elusive colour-packed ‘year-round garden’. Covering ideas on how to use, combine, design with and prolong colour, it focuses on achievable ways of growing plants of every tone through 12 months of the year. It provides gardeners with an inspiring and surprising palette of plants to furnish their plots with sumptuous colour with detailed lists for spring, summer, autumn and winter.
Growveg: The Beginner’s Guide To Easy Vegetables Gardening by Benedict Vanheems ~ For anyone who has ever wanted to tend a little piece of ground but wasn’t sure where to begin, GrowVeg offers simple recipes for gardening projects that are both attainable and beautiful. Benedict Vanheems, editor of the popular website GrowVeg.com, guides aspiring green thumbs to success from the start, no matter what size gardening space you have. Get recommendations for veggie varieties for your first edible garden, plant a miniature orchard, and grow an edible archway, or keep your efforts contained by cultivating a rustic crate of herbs on a sunny balcony, a crop of carrots in a basket, or nutritious and delicious sprouts in a jar on the kitchen counter. The beginner-friendly instructions and step-by-step photography detail more than 30 approachable, small-scale gardening projects that will inspire and empower you to get growing!
Urban Gardening for Beginners: Simple Hacks + Easy Projects For Growing Your Own Food In Small Spaces by Marc Thoma ~ Do you ever wish you could make tea with fresh mint from your windowsill? Or make a salad with ripe red tomatoes from your own front porch? Even if your space is limited, Urban Gardening for Beginners can help you get growing at home. Bursting with advice for cultivating everything from chamomile to zucchini, this planting guide will have you swimming in fresh, sustainable ingredients. Learn how to build a grow light for your studio apartment or turn a tiny patio or balcony into a lush garden oasis, so you can have homegrown food anywhere.
Pollinator Victory Garden by Kim Eierman ~ The passion and urgency that inspired WWI and WWII Victory Gardens is needed today to meet another threat to our food supply and our environment-the steep decline of pollinators. The Pollinator Victory Garden offers practical solutions for winning the war against the demise of these beneficial animals. Pollinators are critical to our food supply and responsible for the pollination of the vast majority of all flowering plants on our planet.Pollinators include not just bees, butmany different types of animals, including insects and mammals. Beetles, bats, birds, butterflies, moths, flies, wasps, and even some mosquito species, can be pollinators. But, many pollinators are in trouble, and the reality is that most of our landscapes have little to offer them. Our residential landscapes, and many commercial landscapes, are filled with vast green pollinator deserts, better known as lawns. These monotonous green expanses are ecological wastelands for bees and other pollinators. By planting a bit differently and by tweaking your landscape aesthetic, you can transition your landscape into a pollinator haven.
Niki Jabbour’s Veggie Garden Remix by Niki Jabbour ~ Best-selling author Niki Jabbour invites you to shake up your vegetable garden with an intriguing array of 224 plants from around the world. With her lively “Like this? Then try this!” approach, Jabbour encourages you to start with what you know and expand your repertoire to try related plants, many of which are delicacies in other cultures. Jabbour presents detailed growing information for each plant, along with fun facts and plant history. Be prepared to have your mind expanded and catch Jabbour’s contagious enthusiasm for experimentation and fun in the garden.
Garden Renovation: Transform Your Tired Yard Into The Garden Of Your Dreams by Bobbie Schwartz ~ Gardens, just like houses, sometimes need makeovers. The changes can be as minor as replacing a shrub or as major as pulling everything up and starting from scratch. No matter the size of your space or the scope of the project, the sage advice in Garden Renovation will help you turn a problem-filled yard into a paradise. Bobbie Schwartz draws on her years of experience as a garden designer to teach gardeners how to evaluate their yards, determine what to keep and what to remove, choose the right plants and design plans for successful remodels, and know when to hire help. A gallery of before-and-after photos provides ideas and inspiration for turning a tired garden into an enlivening retreat.
