American Horticultural Society
The American Gardener
July/August 2008 Recommended Garden Books

Because the AHS Horticultural Book Service was discontinued as of June 30, 2000 no further phone or mail orders are filled. However, AHS members are still be able to order books at a discount by linking to Amazon.com through the Society's Web site. Through this partnership with Amazon.com, AHS members can receive better discounts on most titles, faster delivery, greater inventory, and improved access to hard-to-find books. The books listed here have not been critically evaluated; they have been chosen for description based on unusual subject matter or substantive content. 

The following books are our current recommended garden books from the July/August 2008 issue of The American Gardener. To read the review just click on the book title. You can then order the book directly from Amazon.com by clicking on "Buy this book!" that follows each review.

BOOK REVIEWS
Recommendations for Your Gardening Library

• Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners
• Gardening With Children
• A Child’s Garden: 60 Ideas to Make Any Garden Come Alive for Children
• Garden-Fresh Cooking
• American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree
• Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants
• Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America
• Gardens: A Literary Companion
• The Gardener’s Bedside Reader

BOOK REVIEWS
Recommendations for Your Gardening Library

Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners
James B. Nardi. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2007. 293 pages. Publisher’s price, softcover: $25. Buy This Book

Birders have lots of identification books, so do lovers of butterflies, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles, but where is the guide to help gardeners identify what is in their soil? Finally, we have one, thanks to James Nardi, a biologist at the University of Illinois. Every gardener will surely find Life in the Soil a much needed and very valuable reference.

The book’s obligatory first section on soil itself is a bit dry and contains information that is absolutely necessary but covered in other books. Don’t become discouraged, however, because it’s merely a lead-in to Part Two—the bulk of the book—on “Members of the Soil Community.” Here the microbial and animal kingdoms, from fungi and insects to toads and gophers, are represented and fascinatingly described.

For each group of organisms, Nardi includes a fact box that lists the scientific classification, size, common names used to refer to the group, their place in the soil food web, and their impact on gardening. If the book consisted of these boxes alone, I think it would still be worth owning.

However, Nardi is also a skilled scientific illustrator. Almost every page has a detailed drawing, with size reference, of the soil-dweller he is describing. Gardeners will surely recognize animals they have seen before while working the beds or turning the compost pile but just were not able to identify. Some of Nardi’s drawings also depict the organism in its habitat along with those it eats or those that eat it. Several pages of color photographs and drawings in the center of the book help to further illustrate the informative text.

A final section runs through a few of the main “soil abuses” such as erosion, excessive fertilizer use, and invasive exotic species, and explains how to avoid or mitigate them. The book wraps up with a brief appendix on how to collect and observe life in the soil for those who would like to take a closer look.
Life in the Soil is chock full of interesting natural history and fascinating—even stunning—facts about the individual critters a gardener may encounter in and on the soil. It is a great read and will be a reference this gardener turns to often.

Jeff Lowenfel

Jeff Lowenfels is the author of Teaming With Microbes (Timber Press, 2007). He gardens and hosts a radio show in Anchorage, Alaska.

Gardening With Children
Monika Hannemann, Patricia Hulse, Brian Johnson, Barbara Kurland, and Tracey Patterson. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn, New York, 2007. 120 pages. Publisher’s price, softcover: $9.95. Buy This Book

A Child’s Garden: 60 Ideas to Make Any Garden Come Alive for Children Molly Dannenmaier. Timber Press, Portland, Oregon, 2008. 176 pages. Publisher’s price, softcover: $19.95.  Buy This Book

Young people are becoming increasingly disconnected from nature, which has been linked to numerous detrimental ramifications such as obesity and depression. Yet many people are finding a way to remedy this by exposing kids to meaningful garden experiences. Two noteworthy, affordable books that provide useful, fun ideas for involving children in gardening and nature are Gardening with Children and A Child’s Garden.

I was pleasantly surprised when I opened the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s All-Region Guide, Gardening with Children. What a sweet book! Set up with five primary chapters, it addresses nature’s cycles in terms children can grasp and explores basic ecological concepts through more than 40 hands-on activities. The step-wise instructions are clear and the colorful illustrations are inviting and inspiring. The activities range from science experiments to keeping a nature journal, as well as food and art projects. The over-arching aim is to guide children to be earth stewards, and to appreciate the garden setting.

Perhaps most importantly, this book seems ideally suited for an often neglected audience: caregivers and parents. It doesn’t smack of the dense curriculum, and is very approachable for the caregiver who wants some structure, and yet doesn’t require a detailed “materials needed, time required, learning standards addressed” sort of guide. I especially appreciated the thoughtful sections at the end that provide guidance for adult caregivers interested in maximizing the experience of taking children outside. This would be a wonderful addition to any child care center, home, or after-school setting for primary- and elementary-school-aged children.

Molly Dannenmaier’s A Child’s Garden, first published in 1998, has now been released in a new paperback format. Like Gardening with Children, this book aims to motivate parents and caregivers who are concerned about children’s lack of connection to the outdoors, and it offers 60 ideas for weaving areas geared for children into existing landscapes. Dannenmaier focuses on unstructured play, which is too often overlooked by educators determined to teach children about nature. As she points out in the preface, this book “looks at what children really do when they step outside, unlike what we adults think or wish they might do.”

The introduction provides a detailed historical context for children’s gardens, and then rapidly moves into exploring practical, and often whimsical, gateways back to nature. Ideas revolve around things that naturally attract children to the outdoors, such as water, creatures, dirt, and make-believe. If you’re looking for detailed, step-by-step instructions, you won’t find them here; A Child’s Garden is long on inspiration and beautiful photography, short on very detailed instruction.
Both of these books will provide the parent, caregiver, and anyone interested in engaging children in nature through the garden with all they need to enliven the backyard, existing garden, or intimate public setting.

Marcia Eames-Sheavly

Marcia Eames-Sheavly is the children and youth program leader for the Cornell Garden-Based Learning Program in Ithaca, New York. She was the 2005 recipient of the American Horticultural Society’s Jane L. Taylor Award.

GARDENER’S BOOKS
Summer Reading

Once you’ve had your fill of weeding and watering, summer’s long days offer a great opportunity for a relaxing read in the garden. If you’re anything like me, enjoying a book outside until late in the evening is as good as it gets. I find this setting especially fitting for absorbing works of natural history and plant-lore, of which I am particularly fond. Varying in complexity and length, the following recently published books offer a healthy dose of both of these topics and may inspire pilgrimages into the forest, a local history museum, or even around the world!

American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree (University of California Press, 2007, $27.50) Buy This Book by Susan Freinkel opens like a novel. “Early McAlexander looks through the window of his granddaughter’s car onto a wide open hill fringed by a line of white pines,” the first chapter begins, welcoming readers into a tale of the American chestnut’s history. The antagonist is the fungal blight that has nearly driven this species to extinction over the last century. The book includes both the voices of tree lovers and the vocabulary of plant breeders, entwining heartfelt nostalgia with details about the determined scientific quest to renew this tree’s population. Freinkel’s assertion that “Appalachia mourned the loss of the chestnut because it was, for mountain dwellers, a true and trusted member of their community” resonates with the book’s main message: hope for humankind might just lie in efforts to save a native tree.

Those partial to biographies may enjoy Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants (Atlantic Books, 2008, $35) by Jennifer Potter, about the Tradescants family—father and son - and their plant exploring and collecting expeditions as well as their lives in general. The story of the two Tradescants acts as a vehicle for exploring culture and progress in England and other countries during the 17th century. “This is a book for people who like to get their hands dirty,” writes Potter, “in which dung is measured by the hatful, silkworms nestle between women’s breasts, only palm trees have sex in the vegetable kingdom, and dead dogs are shredded for fertilizer.” So readers beware: this biography contains marvels, monsters, and muck! Buy This Book

For an edifying look at the historical importance of horticulture and its influence on the American landscape, there’s Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America (Harvard University Press, 2008, $39.95). Buy This Book  Author Philip J. Pauley, late professor of history at Rutgers University, meticulously chronicles the shaping of the American landscape during the last 250 years. He addresses topics such as tree planting, invasive species, plant breeding, backyard gardening, and the start of botanic gardens in America. Perhaps a little denser than the average summer reading selection, nonetheless this book is imbued with Pauley’s infectious passion for his topic, which will draw you in and may leave you wondering about the consequences of your own gardening practices as well as the future of our ever-changing American landscape.

Gardens: A Literary Companion (Greystone Books, 2008, $22.95), Buy This Book an anthology with 28 authors ranging from poet Stanley Kunitz to garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, includes voices spanning centuries and continents. In the introduction, editor Merilyn Simmons points out that the term anthology “derives from two Greek words: anthos (flowers) and logy (to speak of).” So it is particularly fitting that this collection also literally has to do with flowers. In addition to this subject, the authors write about their connection to plants: in the wild, in the garden, or, as in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Monet’s Gardens,” in their own imaginations. This book lends itself well to being sampled at random or read from cover to cover. 

Another anthology to consider is The Gardener’s Bedside Reader (Voyageur Press, 2008, $27.95).  Buy This Book Editor Kari Cornell brings together familiar contemporary voices on plants, gardening, and natural history such as Anna Pavord, Diane Ackerman, Dan Hinkley, Tovah Martin, and Ann Lovejoy. This prose celebrates the backyard garden and might even inspire a little digging, especially after excerpts such as Lee May’s that starts, “In this year’s first blushes, promise springs eternal. This is the year I keep a vow to my father and myself; I’ll be growing vegetables again.” This collection is inspiring, funny, and at times lofty: a good primer to the entertaining range of voices that are contributing to modern garden writing.
 

Kirsten Winters, Editorial Intern