Read This: Visionary: Gardens and Landscapes for Our Future
June 23, 2024 In 2019 I reviewed Australian photographer Claire Takacs‘s beautiful and engaging book Dreamscapes. I raved about it but felt compelled to add this critique: “My one complaint about the book is my usual one: coverage of U.S. gardens is limited exclusively to coastal states: the Pacific Northwest ...
Read This: Bird-Friendly Gardening
May 09, 2024 Part of the enjoyment of having a garden is watching the birds drawn to it. We put out birdfeeders, birdhouses, birdbaths, fountains, and ponds to bring them in. But what really attracts birds is plants — and I’m not talking about turf grass. Trees, shrubs, grasses, and ...
Read This: Garden Wonderland, plus BOOK GIVEAWAY
April 25, 2024 Update 5/1: This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to winner Michelle Derviss! We were both brand-new authors at Ten Speed Press when I met Leslie Bennett during the 2013 Fling tour, a connection that immediately felt like a sisterly bond. Leslie was highly regarded as a designer, ...
Read This: Du Pont Gardens of the Brandywine Valley
February 29, 2024 At the Philadelphia Area Fling last September (click here for my posts about it), attendees were given a copy of new book Du Pont Gardens of the Brandywine Valley. The good folks at Longwood Gardens handed the books out as we boarded the buses after a lovely ...
Read This: A garden care guide for DIYers in Central Texas
July 16, 2023 A couple years ago, Austin gardening expert Colleen Dieter handed me a “DIY zine for DIYers” she’d written and published in booklet form. Titled Let’s Care for Texas Plants, the 3-part series distills Colleen’s 12+ years of experience as a professional gardener into an easy-to-digest format for ...
Read This: Dry Climate Gardening
February 14, 2023 I’ve been following Noelle Johnson’s informative and entertaining garden blog, AZ Plant Lady: Ramblings From a Desert Garden, for more than a decade. As a horticulturist and landscape consultant in Phoenix, Noelle is an authority on native and desert-adapted plants suited to her hot, arid climate. Her ...
Read This: American Roots
December 03, 2022 A couple of years ago British gardening TV personality Monty Don made a 3-part series about U.S. gardens to answer the question, “What is an American garden?” Turns out, it’s an impossible question to answer satisfactorily in a country that spans a continent, 13 hardiness zones, and ...
Read This: The Lost Words, a spell book to bring nature back to life
November 10, 2022 For Christmas last year, I gave a book to my grown daughter that enchanted me when I paged through it in a bookstore in Maine. I carried it home and read it cover to cover, savoring its evocative poems about plants and animals and its magical illustrations, ...
Read This: Black Flora
August 28, 2022 A few years ago I had the pleasure of attending a Texas-swing Field to Vase dinner at a flower farm in Blanco as the guest of Debra Prinzing, founder of Slow Flowers, which advocates for using American-grown flowers in the U.S. floral industry. Debra is also co-founder, ...
Read This: The Garden Refresh
June 22, 2022 Solstice, smolstice. Summer arrived in Texas back in early May, with a vengeance. We’ve had 16 triple-digit days already (unseasonably early) and little rain. For many avid gardeners this means sweaty mornings or mosquitoey evenings standing hose-in-hand over young plants stuffed willy-nilly into the garden during the ...
Read This: The View from Federal Twist
April 01, 2022 “I am Federal Twist,” declares James Golden in the preface of his book The View From Federal Twist: A New Way of Thinking About Gardens, Nature and Ourselves (2021). Of course all gardens are personal creations, and good ones have an expressiveness and emotional quality that transcends ...
Read This: Private Gardens of the Pacific Northwest
October 12, 2021 We hot-climate gardeners are finally feeling a breath of fall, as it shoos away the summer doldrums. The eagerly anticipated fall gardening season is at hand. Is it emotionally safe, therefore, to crack open a new book about Pacific Northwest gardens? Let’s live dangerously! Photo courtesy of ...
Read This: Under Western Skies
September 16, 2021 Texas straddles the climatic line between the Southeast and the Southwest — Austin even more so, sitting smack-dab in the middle of the state. We’re not part of the Old South, except perhaps East Texas. But we’re not part of the vast West either, aside from Marfa, ...
Read This: Adventures in Eden takes you on a virtual tour of private European gardens
July 26, 2021 Traveling to Europe for a guided garden tour is on my wish list of dream vacations. Maybe it’s on yours too. While covid precautions and travel restrictions, not to mention cost, may keep nearly everyone from booking such a trip right now, you can still enjoy an ...
Read This: Striking Succulent Gardens
March 09, 2021 After the prolonged deep freeze that Texas endured last month, which reduced our beloved agaves and other succulents to oozing mush and browned nearly everything else back to the roots, it may not seem…timely…for a Texan to review a book about succulent gardening. But it would be ...
Read This: The Art of Outdoor Living
February 05, 2021 Are you craving greenery? Want to drool over gorgeous Southern California patio and entry gardens while gleaning excellent design ideas for your own garden? Then immerse yourself in Los Angeles designer Scott Shrader’s book, The Art of Outdoor Living: Gardens for Entertaining Family and Friends (Rizzoli, 2019) ...
