Tag: Landscaping & Gardening Books

Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Gardening Guides: Cult Status

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Whenever I visit a used bookshop, I march straight to the garden section. Once there, I’ll scan the shelves for slender paperback spines about nine inches tall. I’m looking for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s handbooks, and whenever I find one, I feel like I’ve hit the jackpot. My gardening book library is full of beautiful coffee table books, and I have my fair share of instructional tomes like the indispensable Reader’s Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening, but for practical, actionable advice and ideas, nothing beats BBG’s handbooks.

The Garden began publishing the single-topic guides in 1945. According to Elizabeth Peters, the director of digital and print media at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the original format was more like a bound magazine, published quarterly. “Over time these became the more intentionally edited and assigned books you are familiar with,” she adds.

Above: The Garden still carries some of the original handbooks. You can purchase them on the site; $9.95 to $15.95.
The primers had something of a heyday in the 1990s and early aughts under the leadership of Janet Marinelli, who was BBG’s editorial director for 17 years. “The series was esteemed for leadership in ecological practice topics, including native plants, wildlife support, building soils and plant communities, and an overall right-plant, right-place ethos,” Peters notes. But the series came to a halt in 2015, ending its run after the publication of Japanese-Style Gardens.

“The rise of the Internet and the ubiquity of information and broader focus on the ecological practices we had been promoting eroded the audience,” says Peters. “Rather than moving to publishing coffee-table type books, we phased out the series and now focus on digital content.” The Garden still sells more than a dozen of its handbooks through its site, including Easy Compost, which Peters notes was one of the most popular titles in the series, but for the rest, you’ll have to scour secondhand shops, Amazon’s marketplace, or eBay.

Above: You can find used versions of the handbooks online. This Lot of 5 is $12.99 on eBay.

I’m not alone in my enthusiasm for the out-of-print guides. Erin Scottberg, a writer, garden designer, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden-certified urban horticulturist, has also amassed a collection of the out-of-print guides. “These booklets are so well-written and laid out, making them easy to digest,” Scottberg says. “Each one covers a specific topic that’s narrow enough to not be overwhelming, but not so narrow that they’re not applicable.”

Horticulturalist Heather McCargo, the founder of the non-profit Wild Seed Project, also has a longstanding fondness for the series. She recalls becoming a member of the garden just to gain access to the handbooks. A few years back, McCargo and her team were contemplating a new format for their annual report when she was inspired to create their own single-topic handbooks. (The Wild Seed Project books are the exact same proportions as their predecessors, so they sit beautifully together on a shelf.)

Above: My collection of BBG gardening guides on the bookshelf.

For many of us, myself included, nothing beats the physicality of a small book. “I love the scale: They’re designed to be flipped through with just one hand,” says Jess Gildea, McCargo’s colleague at the Wild Seed Project. “You can have your seed catalog open in front of you, your guide in one hand, and a pen in the other.” And unlike a digital article, you can make notes in the margins, underline key information.

So, if you’re browsing a bookstore in the Northeast, keep an eye out for these treasured books. Or kickstart your own collection with a bundle of handbooks (more here and here, and the motherlode here).

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November 30, 2023
The English Gardener’s Garden, Phaidon’s Gorgeous New Book

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The phrase “English garden” may conjure a particular image in your mind: perhaps the neatly clipped hedges and expansive lawns of a country estate or maybe an informal tumble of blossoms spilling over a path in a cottage garden. The recently-published book The English Gardener’s Garden proves, in 2023, there are a myriad of definitions of what an English garden is.

When Phaidon published The Gardener’s Garden in 2014, the globe-spanning, 500-page book was an instant success. Nearly ten years later, the publisher has narrowed their geographic scope to the English isles. The English Gardener’s Garden extracts the British gardens from the earlier book and offers updated photography and additional gardens for a total of more than 60 English gardens and 300 photographs.

Above: The gardens at Great Dixter in East Sussex have passed through many hands. Once the family home of Christopher Lloyd, they are now under the stewardship of Fergus Garrett. Photograph by Andrew Montgomery, from The English Gardener’s Garden.

With a foreword by garden writer and designer Tania Compton and a brief history of English gardening by Dr. Toby Musgrave, The English Gardener’s Garden is a welcome addition to any Anglophile gardener’s library. It is part inspirational tome and part armchair travel experience with gorgeous photography to linger over.

Above: Dan Pearson was tasked with creating a garden amongst the ruins of Lowther Castle, which are part of a 130 acre estate in Penrith, Cumbria. Photograph by Claire Takacs, from The English Gardener’s Garden.

The book can also be used as a practical guide for planning your next trip to visit English gardens: There’s even a directory of the gardens that are open to the public (we hear many of the private ones are often open as well through the National Garden Scheme’s visiting days).

Above: Levens Hall’s topiaries are some of the oldest in the world. The 10-acre garden located in Kendal, Cumbria was designed by Guillaume Beaumont in the 16th century. Photograph by Richard Bloom, from The English Gardener’s Garden.

The gardens in the book have roots going back 500 years and include designs by legends like Capability Brown and Gertrude Jekyll. These gardens “are not just a dialogue between art and nature but an entire conversation between the spirits of the creators past and present,” writes Compton in her foreword. Indeed, it is the tension between past and present and seeing ancient estates alongside contemporary designs that makes this book so interesting.

Above: Sarah Price’s Maggie’s Centre Garden is located at a cancer center in Southampton, Hampshire. Photograph courtesy by Hufton+Crow, courtesy of Maggie’s Centre, from The English Gardener’s Garden.

Inside you’ll find what Compton describes as “gardens that have risen from the ashes of a neglected past to stride with the times,” such as Dan Pearson’s garden planted amongst the ruins of Lowther Castle, and of-the-moment designs like the Maggie’s Centre Garden located at a cancer center in Southampton, Hampshire, that opened in 2021. The book also wanders into lesser known public and private gardens. I’ve bookmarked Rousham as a must visit for a future date after flipping through the book.

Above: Its gorgeous botanical cover is based on a 1901 print from the Morris & Co. archives; The English Gardener’s Garden is $46.45 on Bookshop.org.

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November 24, 2023
What Makes a Garden, by Jinny Blom: A Review of Her Second Book

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It is not often that one can say with confidence that a coffee table book is “long awaited,” but nothing that landscape designer and writer Jinny Blom creates is so easily boxed, not even her books. Although What Makes A Garden is generously proportioned and handsomely produced, you might find yourself carrying it around wherever you go until it is thoroughly digested. Like her last similar-sized book, the best-selling The Thoughtful Gardener, it’s not a volume to be flicked through.

Instead, What Makes a Garden is a glorious compendium that takes readers deep into the nitty gritty, amply demonstrating that a garden is much more than a collection of things and not limited to a particular ecological manifesto. “A garden needs to be suitably planned to allow the senses true freedom,” says Jinny early on in the book. Personal pleasure still matters.

Photography by Britt Willoughby, from What Makes a Garden.

Above: A landscape in Italy, repaired and designed by Jinny Blom. “The success of a garden is when, after a build, the animals and birds return.”

This is not an eco-memoir or a rallying cry to ditch the old ways. Jinny has always designed nature into her gardens, promoting shaggy shrubs and laid hedges when few others were talking about habitats for ecosystems. King Charles noticed this over 20 years ago when he asked her to design his Healing Garden for the Chelsea Flower Show. Her gardens are happily “unfettered by definition,” as is the book, which leaves no stone unturned in the discussion of every element of what makes a garden, whether “esoteric” or “exoteric,” via a thorough consideration of prima materia as well as anima mundi. Yes, it will have you reaching for a dictionary, which is partly why it can only be read slowly.

Above: Italy. “Garden planting that can semi-naturalize a place is my personal preference. It seems to give a relaxed quality that I enjoy.”

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November 10, 2023