Garden Books for Holiday Gift Giving

Dear Ladies, it is that time of the year again – the time for me to think about all of the gardening books I have ordered for myself this year, and which ones I shall recommend to you as gifts for your gardening friends, or mostly for yourselves if you are like me.

I shall begin this year’s adventures with a book that author Nick McCullough and his co-workers created based on his own pre-Covid adventures travelling the country (22,000 miles of travelling!) and visiting the home gardens of landscape designers, interior designers, home farmers, artists, and generally people he found who love their gardens. The book is American Roots, and it visits these gardens in batches nationwide, broken down regionally. Ohio is well-represented, in part by the McCulloughs’ own home garden. But there is much to learn from all of these lovely, mostly very small, spaces and the people who love them. There is the lady in New Orleans who gathered her roses and handed them to passers-by after a hurricane clobbered their gardens. There are the scavengers who gather old broken stones, bricks from de-constructed homes, wood from downed trees for use in creating terrace floors. There are the plant enthusiasts who live for color stories, and the traditionalists who love hedges best of all. Every garden comes with profiles of favorite plants and lessons learned while it was being created. This book is a lot of fun.

This year saw a new edition published of one of the most useful small books for people who want to learn about plants, Brian Capon’s Botany for Gardeners. That is precisely who it is for, too; not scientists, not scholars, but people who want to know just enough botany to understand their plants. If you don’t need or want to understand the garden, you won’t need it. But if you have always wondered how flowers becomes fruits, or why the wood of certain trees is far more brittle – and therefore far likelier to split in high winds – than that of other trees that are more highly recommended, this is a fun little tome. If you know a starting gardener who is very curious, you could not find a better gift. And it fits in a stocking.

Another marvelous new book for beginning gardeners opens with a very straightforward chapter: “Why You Should Plant a Garden”. But this is actually a great resource for local gardeners of all levels: Native Plant Gardening for Birds, Bees, and Butterflies, Upper Midwest edition, by Jaret C. Daniels. Following its first chapter, this book is entirely devoted to profiles of desirable native plants of our area, from Anise Hyssop to Woodland Sunflower, both of which reside in my front borders and are humming with pollinators throughout their bloom seasons. The book concludes with lists of which plants serve which non-human residents, and which are necessary to the survival of various living species. If you want to incorporate lots of life in your own garden, ask some nice person in your family to buy you this book. It’s a paperback, not expensive, but worth every penny.

The Midwest Native Plant Primer by Alan Branhagen provides some of the same information, but for a greater number of plants and with more of an eye to their specific applications in home garden design. Before studying individual plants themselves, Branhagen leads his reader through the basics of a garden plan. Take inventory of what you have. Analyze the soil, climate, and conditions in your specific site. Develop a sense of what your own aesthetics are. Consider traditional styles – do you want an area to grow food? A series of outdoor sitting rooms? Wide open spaces with maximized views? Running water? And then begin to plan with these basic materials. If your adult son or daughter is planting their first home garden, this might be a good book to start them off.

Those of you who have read my book articles in the past know that I always enjoy a bit of garden philosophy. This year I suggest Hannah Lewis’s Mini-Forest Revolution, which delves into the Miyawaki Method, a reforestation method which has recently begun to catch interest worldwide. It is a novel approach to what each individual human can do in response to the despair we may feel over our mounting climate crisis. Densely plant a truly tiny, tiny (or start tiny, anyway) forest to celebrate locally appropriate biodiversity, and you will see how it may affect a much greater ecosystem all around you and your mini-forest. Late in his life, Professor Miyawaki wrote “Nothing is greater than living. Then what is the reason for living? It is to do something anyone can do anywhere for our tomorrow. I want everyone to do what they can do. I will plant trees for the next thirty years – for myself, my loved ones, for Japan, for the future of the seven billion people living on this planet. Let’s plant trees together.” This is a book full of hope. I cannot say more.

Finally, I always like to suggest a big, pretty coffee table book chockful of big, pretty pictures of big, pretty gardens. This is the sort of thing to send your godmother, or to present to your garden-loving Mom. This year, I offer a recommendation for WILD, The Naturalistic Garden, by Noel Kingsbury (text) and Claire Takacs (photography). Like many such books, this one visits great landscapes around the world. The difference with this book is that the gardens profiled here, although painstakingly researched and designed, are inspired by natural landscapes. Not surprisingly, the profiles open with a look at a brilliant Piet Oudolf garden in Somerset, England. Oudolf is one of the greatest practitioners of this garden style in the world. Cityscapes, factory gardens, parks, prairies, even gardens as surprising as Christopher Lloyd’s Great Dixter and the New York Botanical Garden are explored in light of this new and very modern style. It’s a thought-provoking and very pleasing volume.

I shall close with quick, “fun read” recommendations. This year, there is a new Forest School book – Forest School for Grown-ups by Richard Irvine. Newly retired husband? Son with a new property? This is for fun!

And if you know another garden nerd like me, there is lots of amusement to be had in Robert Pavlis’s Soil Science for Gardeners. You will have to trust me on this one!