10 Best Christmas Books for Garden Lovers
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These Wonderful Books To Read For Garden Lovers & Family this Christmas Season…
1. Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life by Marta McDowell, Publisher:Timber Press
Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life is the 1st book to explore the origins of Beatrix Potter’s love of gardening and plants and show how this passion came to be reflected in her work.
It begin with a gardener’s biography, highlighting the key moments and places throughout her life that helped define her, including her home Hill Top Farm in England’s Lake District.
Next, the reader follows Beatrix Potter through a year in her garden, with a season-by-season overview of what is blooming that truly brings her gardens alive. The book culminates in a traveler’s guide, with information on how and where to visit Potter’s gardens today.
Richly illustrated and filled with quotations from her books, letters, and journals, it is essential reading for all who know and cherish Beatrix Potter’s classic tales.
2. Complete Book Of Vegetables, Herbs & Fruit
In “The Complete Book of Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruit, a dream team of top gardening experts provides for each plant: A history of the its origins and how it has traditionally been used; common, family, and Latin names; a wide-ranging list of species from which to choose, detailing size, leaf shape, form, and color; information on cultivation and propagation, pests and diseases; and harvesting and storage tips. The book explores all uses–“medicinal, culinary, cosmetic and domestic–“and features more than 600 recipes for enjoying your bounty.And Fruits
3. Contemporary Designers’ Own Gardens
Contemporary Designers’ Own Gardens offers a rare opportunity to view twenty gardens not generally open to the public, each one owned and designed by a garden designer
Contemporary Designers’ Own Gardens is an inspirational, informative and beautiful work, which will appeal to anyone who is interested in gardening, landscape architecture and garden design, be they a beginner or a professional.
4. Elizabeth David on Vegetables
Elizabeth David revolutionized British cooking, her recipes bringing the color and vibrancy of Mediterranean dishes to kitchens everywhere.
This beautiful new cookbook marks the first time David’s beloved vegetable recipes have been collected in one volume and celebrates her lifetime’s cooking by featuring a range of delicious, timeless dishes filled with irresistible flavors and scents.
5. Gardening in Miniature: Create Your Own Tiny Living World
The next garden trend combines the joy of gardening with the magic of miniatures. Gardening in Miniature is a complete guide to creating lush, living, small-scale gardens. It has everything you need to pick up this new hobby, including scaled down garden designs, techniques for creating tiny hardscapes, miniature garden care and maintenance, tips on choosing containers, how to buy the right plants, and where to find life-like accessories. Inspiring step-by-step projects feature basic skills that can be recreated in any number of designs, like a tiny patio, a trellis, a pond, and a secret garden.
6. RHS Botany for Gardeners
This book makes for an extremely attractive and alluring package. If you have ever felt the urge to know exactly what a spadix or a corymb is, or what shape a panduriform leaf is, then the answer will be in here. It’s a beautifully illustrated and well-organised hardback, printed on buff-coloured paper to emphasise venerability and lasting value in spite of youth; it already looks and feels like a Victorian tome one might come across in the Lindley Library. As well as in-depth botanical summaries, there are sections on pruning and also biographical portraits of leading figures in the field (literally).
7. RHS Chelsea Flower Show: A Centenary Celebration
Chelsea Flower Show is an annual, world famous and well-loved horticultural and social event. In May 2013 Chelsea celebrates its hundredth birthday. This book will be the essential centenary souvenir, and an enduring look at what makes Chelsea special.
8. The Gardens of Venice
The Gardens of Venice and the Veneto takes in a varied selection of gardens old and new, large and small, public and private. It ranges from tiny monastery gardens tucked away within the walls of Venice to grand palatial landscapes in the former marshes of the hinterland. The book is divided into five sections as well as a lively introduction which captures the rich history of this region. The first section will show the extraordinary gardens still to be found locked behind high walls in the city itself.
9. The Manual of Seed Saving
The Manual of Seed Saving is an authoritative guide from experts around the globe. Supported by research from the global conservation organizations Arche Noah and Pro Specie Rara, it features information on how to maximize seed quality and yield for more than 100 crop plants. It includes popular market plants like asparagus, carrots, corn, rhubarb, spinach, squash, and tomatoes. Plant profiles include critical information on pollination, isolation distances, cultivation, harvest, storage, and pests and diseases
10. The New English Garden
The past ten to fifteen years has been an exceptionally rich period in English garden design, and for this book Tim Richardson has selected 25 gardens which have gone through an intense phase of creativity and innovation during this time span.
The gardens chosen (most of which are open to the public), cover the wide range of styles flourishing in English garden design today and range from the Prince of Wales’s garden at Highgrove, through Trentham Gardens (a ‘Capability’ Brown landscape imaginatively reworked for the twentieth-century by Piet Oudolf, Tom Stuart-Smith and Dominic Cole), Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s own garden and ‘laboratory for design ideas’ at Gresgarth and Dan Pearson’s Gardener’s Cottage to Christopher Bradley-Hole’s Modernist garden at Crockmore House, Kim Wilkie’s astonishing Orpheus Landform, and Alasdair Ford’s truly original garden of sculptures and poetic inferences at Plaz Metaxu.
1. Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life by Marta McDowell, Publisher:Timber Press
Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life is the 1st book to explore the origins of Beatrix Potter’s love of gardening and plants and show how this passion came to be reflected in her work.
It begin with a gardener’s biography, highlighting the key moments and places throughout her life that helped define her, including her home Hill Top Farm in England’s Lake District.
Next, the reader follows Beatrix Potter through a year in her garden, with a season-by-season overview of what is blooming that truly brings her gardens alive. The book culminates in a traveler’s guide, with information on how and where to visit Potter’s gardens today.
Richly illustrated and filled with quotations from her books, letters, and journals, it is essential reading for all who know and cherish Beatrix Potter’s classic tales.
2. Complete Book Of Vegetables, Herbs & Fruit
In “The Complete Book of Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruit, a dream team of top gardening experts provides for each plant: A history of the its origins and how it has traditionally been used; common, family, and Latin names; a wide-ranging list of species from which to choose, detailing size, leaf shape, form, and color; information on cultivation and propagation, pests and diseases; and harvesting and storage tips. The book explores all uses–“medicinal, culinary, cosmetic and domestic–“and features more than 600 recipes for enjoying your bounty.And Fruits
3. Contemporary Designers’ Own Gardens
Contemporary Designers’ Own Gardens offers a rare opportunity to view twenty gardens not generally open to the public, each one owned and designed by a garden designer
Contemporary Designers’ Own Gardens is an inspirational, informative and beautiful work, which will appeal to anyone who is interested in gardening, landscape architecture and garden design, be they a beginner or a professional.
4. Elizabeth David on Vegetables
Elizabeth David revolutionized British cooking, her recipes bringing the color and vibrancy of Mediterranean dishes to kitchens everywhere.
This beautiful new cookbook marks the first time David’s beloved vegetable recipes have been collected in one volume and celebrates her lifetime’s cooking by featuring a range of delicious, timeless dishes filled with irresistible flavors and scents.
5. Gardening in Miniature: Create Your Own Tiny Living World
The next garden trend combines the joy of gardening with the magic of miniatures. Gardening in Miniature is a complete guide to creating lush, living, small-scale gardens. It has everything you need to pick up this new hobby, including scaled down garden designs, techniques for creating tiny hardscapes, miniature garden care and maintenance, tips on choosing containers, how to buy the right plants, and where to find life-like accessories. Inspiring step-by-step projects feature basic skills that can be recreated in any number of designs, like a tiny patio, a trellis, a pond, and a secret garden.
6. RHS Botany for Gardeners
This book makes for an extremely attractive and alluring package. If you have ever felt the urge to know exactly what a spadix or a corymb is, or what shape a panduriform leaf is, then the answer will be in here. It’s a beautifully illustrated and well-organised hardback, printed on buff-coloured paper to emphasise venerability and lasting value in spite of youth; it already looks and feels like a Victorian tome one might come across in the Lindley Library. As well as in-depth botanical summaries, there are sections on pruning and also biographical portraits of leading figures in the field (literally).
7. RHS Chelsea Flower Show: A Centenary Celebration
Chelsea Flower Show is an annual, world famous and well-loved horticultural and social event. In May 2013 Chelsea celebrates its hundredth birthday. This book will be the essential centenary souvenir, and an enduring look at what makes Chelsea special.
8. The Gardens of Venice
The Gardens of Venice and the Veneto takes in a varied selection of gardens old and new, large and small, public and private. It ranges from tiny monastery gardens tucked away within the walls of Venice to grand palatial landscapes in the former marshes of the hinterland. The book is divided into five sections as well as a lively introduction which captures the rich history of this region. The first section will show the extraordinary gardens still to be found locked behind high walls in the city itself.
9. The Manual of Seed Saving
The Manual of Seed Saving is an authoritative guide from experts around the globe. Supported by research from the global conservation organizations Arche Noah and Pro Specie Rara, it features information on how to maximize seed quality and yield for more than 100 crop plants. It includes popular market plants like asparagus, carrots, corn, rhubarb, spinach, squash, and tomatoes. Plant profiles include critical information on pollination, isolation distances, cultivation, harvest, storage, and pests and diseases
10. The New English Garden
The past ten to fifteen years has been an exceptionally rich period in English garden design, and for this book Tim Richardson has selected 25 gardens which have gone through an intense phase of creativity and innovation during this time span.
The gardens chosen (most of which are open to the public), cover the wide range of styles flourishing in English garden design today and range from the Prince of Wales’s garden at Highgrove, through Trentham Gardens (a ‘Capability’ Brown landscape imaginatively reworked for the twentieth-century by Piet Oudolf, Tom Stuart-Smith and Dominic Cole), Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s own garden and ‘laboratory for design ideas’ at Gresgarth and Dan Pearson’s Gardener’s Cottage to Christopher Bradley-Hole’s Modernist garden at Crockmore House, Kim Wilkie’s astonishing Orpheus Landform, and Alasdair Ford’s truly original garden of sculptures and poetic inferences at Plaz Metaxu.