GARDENING BOOKS HELPS US RELAX AND GET INSPIRED
This is one for the bedside table
By David Bare

It was a good year for garden books. Not so much the kind that tell you to plant your petunias 2½ feet apart and fertilize weekly but the kind you want to sit down and savor.

I hope the rest of the gardening community was as surprised and delighted as I was when Beautiful at All Seasons (Duke University Press, $24.95), a collection of columns written by Elizabeth Lawrence from the Charlotte Observer, was published. Lawrence wrote for the Observer from August 1957 to June 1971. This collection contains 132 essays on topics as wide ranging as honey and night-blooming cereus, pioneer seedsmen and how the Christian year parallels the garden year.

Reading these essays is like picking through a box of fine chocolates, each one to be savored, carefully nibbled and melted in your mouth. Lawrence’s knowledge of plants is steeped in history, literature and mythology and informed by her correspondence with fellow gardeners, professionals and amateurs.
Reading Lawrence reminds us that gardening is a way to connect to our community, our history and traditions and ultimately to the world around us. This is one for the bedside table.

Barbara Kingsolver added her voice to a growing movement focused on eating locally last year when she published Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (Harper Collins $26.95). With her husband, Steven Hopp, and daughter, Camille Kingsolver, she has created a book that is an engaging account of the family’s attempt to live and eat as close to home as possible, an indictment of everything that is wrong with our present food system, a cookbook and a prose poem to rural living.

Hopp gives us the science, Camille Kingsolver covers cooking and nutrition and Barbara knits it all together into a seamless narrative, following a calendar year. The family moved from the Southwest to the Appalachian Mountains with the intention of “deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water and breathed the air,” a “year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew.”

Kingsolver delivers with her characteristic engaging style, unfolding the story as the seasons pass from winter’s cupboards to the fresh delights of spring into the bounty of summer and autumn. Along the way, we learn about the slow-foods movement, heirloom vegetables and livestock, morel hunting, cheese making and lots of lore on vegetable gardening.

The book is peppered throughout with Hopp’s sidebars full of often-astonishing statistics: “Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles.” This is a book that will make you think about the role we all play in the health of our planet simply by what we put on our plates every day.

The authors recognize that food choice is a way to personally influence our footprint on the environment. The Kingsolver family’s convictions never seem overly zealous; rather, this charming book carries you along like a good novel, all the while presenting the facts of a food system gone awry and the simple way to correct it, one plate at a time.

Be forewarned: This book may make you tear up the front yard and plant a vegetable garden, buy a freezer or think twice before you buy bananas. See you at the farmers’ market.

Timber Press has recently published Down to Earth with Helen Dillon ($29.95). Dillon is a highly accomplished Irish gardener with a friendly, easygoing manner and a good sense of humor. She is as likely to report on her failures as her successes. This book is divided into three sections, the first, aimed at the beginning gardener, covers the elementals: weeding, feeding and some design aspects. The middle section of the book goes into more complicated issues, and the third section covers such things as exotic planting and winter skeletons.

Dillon’s garden is truly beautiful and displayed throughout in gorgeous photographs. The book is a pleasure to leaf through. American beginners would do well to come to this book with a basic understanding of gardening in our country, though. A clear example lies in the chapter “Potting for Beginners,” in which Dillon begins by noting how garden novices get “muddled” by the word compost as it is used to mean both garden compost and bagged soil for filling pots.

In the United States, of course, compost is called potting soil in this sense, and garden compost is just compost. Like most books with origins in the U.K., there is discussion of plants we are unlikely to ever lay eyes on here. Sometimes it is hard to jibe the casual narrative with the exacting formality of the garden in the photographs. Still, I like this book. Dillon brings an ease and a conversational tone to the text and she can be very funny. “You’ve probably heard the saying that statues are simply the gnomes of the upper classes ... Anyway I always feel that on your way around the garden, if you come face to face with something that seems to be saying ‘Hi, look at me -- I’m your garden feature’ then it’s time for it to go.”

Christopher Lloyd passed away in 2006, and the last of this great English gardener’s string of books was published recently by Timber press. Exotic Planting for Adventurous Gardeners ($29.95) recounts how Lloyd transformed a rose garden surrounded by tall sculpted yew hedges into a neatly contained wonderland of some of the world’s most beautiful plants.

Lloyd had lived and gardened at Great Dixter all his life and received the Victoria Medal of Honour, the Royal Horticultural Society’s highest honor. He was one of the world’s recognized masters of the trade and was in the forefront of the movement that combined sculptural tropical foliage plants – cannas, bananas and such – with exotic and colorful flowering plants. This sumptuous book exhibits his talent with combining plants on every page.

Unlike many English gardening books, this one has many familiar plants, and it is interesting to compare how similar our methods of protecting our tender treasures are. Lloyd died before completing the book, but it is rounded out by some of horticulture’s true luminaries – Anna Pavord, Roy Lancaster and the aforementioned Helen Dillon, to name a few.

David Bare writes for the Winston-Salem Journal.