Garden Books for Holiday Gifting, 2019

I have just a few quick book ideas this year, but I hope you will enjoy one or two of these. And please consider two books I listed in this year’s recommended garden and nature books for children as gifts for adults also. Any garden or nature enthusiast of any age would enjoy The Lost Words and Sing a Song of Seasons.

Along the lines of The Lost Words, I recommend an adult book by the same author, Robert MacFarlane: Landmarks. This treasure was published in 2015, and I have no idea how I missed it until this year. It is an ode to nature, landscape, and words in Britain. I cannot do better justice than to quote a review in The Daily Telegraph: “Passionate and magical…a deep scholarship of the countryside with an adventurous approach, all rendered in an immaculate, delicious prose….A kind of manual of how people in love with place and language are created by landscape.” This is a joyous little book for diving in and out on a winter day.

For tree lovers, the best new offering, beautifully written and illustrated, is Jonathan Drori’s Around the World in 80 Trees. Biographies of historically, botanically, or culturally important trees from all around the globe are presented, each with not only useful information on its history and growth but also with tales of their actual pasts or how they have helped to form the folk knowledge of their homelands. Here is the story of argan oil and its relationship with the goats who are the background of the local economy. Here is the tree from Australia that paved the streets of London in the 1880’s. Here is the tree used today in the Bahamas to create an aphrodisiac. Here are the trees that house the spirits of your ancestors. Here is the tree beneath which the Buddha found enlightenment. This is a book for the nightstand, full of inspiration for fine dreams.

And for someone a little more interested in facing ecological crisis, I recommend highly Courtney White’s Grass, Soil, Hope: A Journey through Carbon Country. This is a book full of Hope, in the face of climate change, economic teetering, and ecological degradation. In a mere 225 pages, White clarifies for the common reader the most important means to sequester carbon (reduce emissions of CO2), to enrich our farming soils, and to preserve wild lands – and not only explains what to do, but how to do it. If you are looking for a set of simple, straightforward explanations, this book and the previous one will fill your need nicely.

The History of Landscape Design in 100 Gardens isn’t, really. But it’s a fine introduction to concepts of landscape design as seen through the eyes of Linda A. Chisholm and the lenses of Michael D. Garber. For anyone who loves to look at pretty pictures of world-famous gardens, this book is a winner. It’s a brighter, easier, better illustrated, and MUCH shorter variation on the classic 1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die, and it will take up less of your remaining travel time!

Many of you who have read my suggestions over the years will recognize a favorite theme in this next choice, A New Garden Ethic, by Benjamin Vogt. This is a brief but important argument in favor of mental and physical health, brought about not only for ourselves but also for our ecosystems by planting richly diverse and heavily native gardens in our urban and suburban settings. Vogt’s gentle and poetic prose helps the reader to see how our lives, our lands, our plants, and our pollinators can draw together in beautiful defiance of the ecological dangers we now face. This would be a great gift for a student about to leave home for college, or someone about to take on his or her first urban home.

Finally, there are always a few geeks like me who want to understand the nitty gritty details of the science that supports books like Grass, Soil, Hope. I offer you two choices. Either get to know David Burke at Holden Forests and Gardens and just listen while he speaks at length about soil health, or buy for yourself (or someone who will let you borrow your gift back from them) Mycorrhizal Planet by Michael Phillips. This is a very clear, well-illustrated, and relatively short book that will explain exactly how soils become healthy and productive – it’s the fungi that set up mutually supportive colonies with plant roots. Now you’ll know how to keep your soil, and thus your plants healthy. You’ll learn why you should never till your garden. You’ll learn how, and how not, to mulch. And you’ll be able to explain it to others! Isn’t it always fun to be able to teach your friends?