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Newsletter Posts

Gifts for the Bookshelves of Grown-up Gardeners    

Robin Schachat

During the past year we have had the opportunity to welcome some very pleasant new books to our gardening shelves. Here are a few you might consider giving the gardeners on your holiday gift lists.

A very different and more practical approach to our local ecosystems is available from The Midwest Native Plant Primer, 225 Plants for an Earth-Friendly Garden, by Alan Branhagen, from Timber Press.  This is a beautifully photographed paperback that begins with a discussion of the genius loci of our native spaces, and how to design best in keeping with it.  The greater part of the book, however, is a list of trees, shrubs, and perennials that inspire our midwestern landscapes.  Each candidate is discussed thoughtfully, with an eye toward where and how it should best be used.  This is an excellent reference work, especially for gardeners who want to attract pollinators, birds, and animals, and reduce the time they spend maintaining plants that somehow never quite fit.

For the pensive ecologist who lives in Ohio, Kent State University Press has published one of those perfect, thoughtful collections of essays that are a pleasure to encounter on the nightstand in the guest room of a good friend – or on one’s own nightstand.  It is a PEN AMERICA Literary Award winner by Deborah Fleming, who lives on a farm near here:  Resurrection of the Wild, Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape.  Fleming’s prose is poetic (she is also an award-winning poet), relatable, and intelligent.  Her thoughts open the reader’s mind in all sorts of directions, all of which eventually circle us back to the importance of our beautiful ecosystems here.

Every year I like to include in the list a beautiful book of pictures of one or more famous gardens, and also a book about one or more famous gardeners.  This year we have both to enjoy in one gorgeous volume, Windcliff, by Dan Hinkley, with photography by Claire Takacs.  Dan Hinkley is a famed plant explorer who in his younger adulthood created Heronswood Gardens, his home and also his nursery for many years, in Washington State.  Now he has moved on to create Windcliff, a personal labor of landscape love set above Puget Sound with a view stretching to the Cascade Mountain Range.  Hinkley (ironically also a product of our Midwest, as we learn in his text) is one of the most brilliant garden writers of our time, and this volume is a love story written to the garden of his maturity.

I don’t quite know how, but some years ago I missed the publication of a joyful book that has now been re-released in an attractive oversize paperback format, Arboretum America, A Philosophy of the Forest, by Diana Beresford-Kroeger, with photos by her husband Christian Kroeger.  Those of you who know me well know that I am a tree-hugging tree-lover, and this is a book for someone like me who lives in a place like northeast Ohio (the author is a scientist in southern Ontario).  The essence of the work  is finding a way to restore health of humans, animals, and the planet by studying and planting trees, and the book is designed to do so by looking at twenty genuses of common trees, all of which you can find while walking through parks, gardens, arboreta, and backyards right here.  How should they be cared for?  What is their function in nature?  How do they fill a place in a human-centric bioplan?  If you love trees or if you love our ecosystem, this is a wonderful book.

If, on the other hand, you are looking for a bit of lighthearted fun in a garden book, welcome to Cattail Moonshine & Milkweed Medicine by Tammi Hartung. This little charmer is full of silly stories, historical snippets, unexpected uses, and herbalist lore about all sorts of North American plants.  Did you know that native Americans in Maine used the resin of spruce trees for chewing gum, but the Luiseno of California chewed California poppy blossoms?  Did you know that American persimmon wood is favored for creating wooden golf clubs?  That black currant juice may prevent liver cancer?   That walnut hulls, boiled, provided one of our earliest hair dyes?  That roots of yucca, swished in water, make soap?  That neurotoxin in buckeyes can be used to stun fish, who then float to the surface and can be caught in a net?

For more direct humor, look to Luke Ruggenberg’s Plants Are Terrible People.  Ruggenberg is a horticulturist, but clearly was born to be a comedian,  This silly romp follows the hapless gardener as he interacts with Amazeballs Hydrangeas, his pet rutabaga named Kevin, a disappearing murderous chain saw, the yellow jackets nested in the mower, and the inspector from the local water board, among others.

And about those yellow jackets – this final book is for them.  The Pollinator Victory Garden by Kim Eierman sounds a bit holier-than-thou, or at least it would to Luke Ruggenberg, but this is actually a very important little book.  My hero, the great expert on backyard ecosystems and saving our world, Doug Tallamy, says ”Kim has thought of everything with a truly comprehensive guide to improving the lot of our pollinators at home.  Make a pollinator victory garden and join the effort to save our most essential creatures!”  She tells you what to do, how to do it, and – most important – why.  If you have seen the bumper stickers that tell you the death of pollinators means no more plants, and therefore no more food, this book tells you how to fix it.

And if you haven’t learned all of that by now, go back and read Doug Tallamy’s books!

Happy New Year of Gardening!