When gardeners aren’t gardening, they like to read about it — and we’re entering the reading season.
Whether you’re growing vegetables, designing a landscape, or simply cultivating from the couch, here are a few new books that should please, or at least help you stroke a name off your holiday gift list.
Rows of red and rows of blue, everything sorted by tint and hue. That’s one way to fill a flower bed, but for those of us who are challenged by the subtleties of design and plant flowers as though we’re colour-blind, stick this book on your Christmas list. Encyclopedia of Planting Combinations by Tony Lord has been around for a few years, but has recently been revised and updated. With a thousand colour photographs and more than 4,000 plant combinations, it should hold the perfect combination for your front yard.
Yet it isn’t simply about the selection of divine colour combinations — the paint department at your local hardware store can do that for you. This book is far more comprehensive, showing how to choose the perfect combinations of form, colour, texture, size, and foliage under a wide range of conditions. This is the essential sourcebook for anyone serious about garden design. Originally a pricey hardcover, it has been reissued by Firefly Books in flexi-bound paperback with a list price of $45.
If the size of your carrots or the flavour of your tomatoes is more important to you than whether they get along anesthetically, the gift book for you or your earthy friend is No Guff Vegetable Gardening by Donna Balzer and Steven Biggs. Both are garden coaches and horticulturalists — Donna is based in Calgary and Steven in Toronto — so they have the vagaries of weather and climate of this country figured out.
With whimsical illustrations by Mariko McCrae, it’s a fun read, complemented by solid information. The authors believe gardening is a lot easier than most people think and offer uncomplicated advice to guide gardeners in making their own decisions. This softcover volume from No Guff Press has a list price of $29.95. If your local bookstore doesn’t have it, order online at www.gardencoacheschat.com.
Another book about vegetable gardening is The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener: How to Grow Your Own Food 365 Days a Year, No Matter Where You Live by Nikki Jabour.
Nikki lives in Nova Scotia in a climate similar to ours, although her book promotes the concept of gardening year-round wherever you happen to live. It’s a comprehensive book that provides tons of information on suitable plants and effective ways of dealing with freezing temperatures without a heated greenhouse. It can indeed be done without expensive structures and exactly how is covered in detail. Who wouldn’t want fresh from the garden veggies in the middle of winter? Strorey Publishing produced the book, which has a list price of $23.95 softcover and $35.95 hardcover.
Add Gardening from a Hammock by Ellen Novack and Dan Cooper of Toronto to the list of helpful books. This one is especially for those that don’t wish to be a slave to their garden, but prefer to be relaxed about it. It has tips and advice from 18 talented gardeners — master gardeners, nursery owners, plantsmen and garden writers — all who have discovered how to reduce the work required without compromising the result. Published by the authors, this softcover book ($22.95) can be found at bookstores or ordered online through www.gardeningfromahammock.com/.
For a book produced for gardeners that will help you track down anything mentioned in the books above, or anything remotely connected with gardening, see Margaret Bennet Alder’s Toronto Gardener’s Journal and Source Book, priced at $24.95. Find it online at www.torontogardenbook.com.
Should you prefer to take it easy and read about plants, rather than sweat over them, there are books for you, too.
See The Untamed Garden: A Revealing Look at our Love Affair with Plants, a hardcover volume written by Sonya Day and published ($26.95) by McClelland and Stewart It could be described as a “Fifty Shades of Grey for Gardener” as it’s filled with stories of the myth and magic of plants, describing the ways they were used romantically throughout the ages to seduce and beguile. Innocence, lust, passion, and desire — and it’s illustrated. Day has them all covered in an irreverent and humorous style.
There, that amount of reading should keep you going at last until February.
David Hobson gardens in Waterloo and is happy to answer garden questions, preferably by email: garden@gto.net. Reach him by mail c/o Etcetera, The Record, 160 King St. E. Kitchener, Ont. N2G 4E5
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