Tag: Required Reading

Garden Wonderland, by Leslie Bennett: A Review of the Garden Designer’s New Book

Garden designer Leslie Bennett’s new book Garden Wonderland (out April 2, 2024) is full of delicious surprises. For one, it’s so much more than a book about edible landscape design, for which Bennett’s design-build firm Pine House Edible Gardens, is best known. Yes, there are plenty of fruit trees and raised veggie beds within, but the book includes other types of gardens as well. It’s broken into five types of wonderland: edible, floral, healing, gathering, and cultural.

The 18 client gardens, plus Bennett’s own backyard, that are featured in the book are gorgeous, immersive, and aspirational, but they also feel eminently approachable, like they could belong to your cool friend (not someone with a full-time gardener). Those people and their stories are also right there in the pages of the book: Bennett’s clients were all photographed in their gardens, which is something you don’t often see. The result is a volume that feels deeply human and captures the spirit of “wonder” that Bennett hopes we will experience in our gardens.

Above: Leslie’s own garden wonderland, in Oakland, CA.

More than just a dreamy coffee table book, Garden Wonderland is packed with practical how-to advice and takeaways for both novice and seasoned gardeners. We spoke to Bennett to find out how we can all weave more wonder into our backyards.

Photography by Rachel Weill, from Garden Wonderland.

Focus on plants.

Above: Fragrant English lavender, edible pineapple guava (Feijoa sellowiana), Agave celsii, kalanchoe, and kangaroo paws fill this cottage garden. Their contrasting foliage and flowers provide year-round beauty.

To pay attention to plants in a garden may sound like obvious advice, but Bennett points out that many of today’s yards center around expensive hardscape elements or fancy furniture. “In contrast, a garden wonderland is a plant-based space where fairly minimal hardscape will do,” Bennett notes in her introduction. “By designing your garden using lots of lushly layered, interactive plants, you can create a place where you will be surrounded by plant and animal life and awaken all your senses. You may brush past a scented geranium and welcome its fragrance or savor the taste of luscious homegrown fruit.”

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March 28, 2024
Perennial Tulips: Polly Nicholson on How to Grow Native Species

It is the straight species, though, that hold the most promise. “In my opinion, species tulips are the future, and an exciting one,” says Polly. They can be naturalized in grass or gravel, taken indoors in small pots, or placed in a tulipière (this one above is made by Katrin Moye). Species tulips are the past as well: “also known as wild or botanical tulips [they] are the forerunners of all tulips grown in gardens today.”

The tulips that we mainly think of as classic are a bit like standard King Alfred daffodils or Pink Lady apples; the mainstream selection is narrow in comparison to the huge variety of species and historic cultivars. This book will persuade you that these are worth seeking out, and there is not much detective work to be done, if you consult Polly’s lists toward the back.

Above: Naturalized under globe-pruned pear trees, Tulipa clusiana ‘Peppermintstick’, is offered widely and easy to grow.

Successful, multiplying colonies of species tulips in a garden are the result of trial and error, while attempting to replicate their original conditions. Sometimes they need to be moved around before they find the right home. Tulipa clusiana is recommended for beginners. T. clusiana ‘Peppermintstick’ grows at the front of a border in Polly’s walled garden; its looks are a mix of diffidence and artifice that annual tulips cannot match. “It has obviously been introduced, but it looks completely natural and at home.”

Above: Naturally spreading, yellow Tulipa sylvestris is one of the original, un-hybridized wild tulips.

In gardens, Tulipa sylvestris is best placed among spring herbage and flowers that are not also bright yellow, so that its shape and subtle coloring, with brown-green stems and sepals, can be seen at their best. It’s shown here with Narcissus ‘Thalia’ and dark hellebores in woodland beds. Rough ground is more accommodating than a flower bed, though, as they spread through underground stolons. With a similar profile and intensity of color, Tulipa sprengeri is a throbbing, warm red species flower that may find itself radiating alone, or mainly against green. Polly grows them with irises.

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March 21, 2024
Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Gardening Guides: Cult Status

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
Dacha: The Soviet Country Cottage, A Photo Book by Fyodor Savintsev

In northern Europe there are varying ideas of what a summer house might be: a place by the water in Scandinavia, a dwelling among vegetables in Germany, or, in the UK, a leaky outdoor room, maybe furnished with a couple of old chairs. In Russia there is the dacha, a more elusive term that is as central to its culture as samovars and vodka. They were bestowed as a favor by a tsar or a Communist official, and at one point, numbered in the millions across Russia, in every shape and size, handed down between generations. Many still remain, but as Fyodor Savintsev’s wonderfully textured photographs in the new book Dacha reveal, they are too often on their last legs.

Accompanied by romantic autochromes dug up by Anna Benn (author of the engaging essay that accompanies Savintsev’s pictures), Dacha: The Soviet Country Cottage is a volume to inspire builders and dreamers. There’s no denying the charm of rushing to one’s dacha every weekend in summer on a crowded, antique train. With its “relaxed sociability” and an incentive to grow things, the concept of a dacha has never been more interesting.

Photography by Fyodor Savintsev, courtesy of Fuel.

Above: Most of the dachas documented in this book are the sort that photographer Savintsev remembers from his childhood summers spent at the dachas of his grandparents and cousins near Moscow. Pre-revolutionary, wooden, with multi-paned windows, they have the romance of a Nordic folk tale.

Above: With parents working during the week in the city, dacha life with the grandparents taught old-fashioned values and rituals such as growing, picking, and preserving.

Above: The Russian writer Alexander Pushkin described the privileged aspects of pre-Revolution dacha living: Easy enough to get to after a night at the theater, they invited subversive behavior “beyond the norms and hierarchies of the city,” says Anna Benn, who reminds us of Pushkin’s influence on the Tolstoy novel Anna Karenina.

Above: At Arkhangelsk, in northern Russia, post-war dachas were small plots of land given out for the purpose of vegetable growing. “Restrictions on the footprint of a building meant that they were often expanded vertically, with overhanging second floors and attics, rather than take up valuable space for attics.” Bourgeois leisure was not the point here.

Above: “The elaborate glazing of many dachas is as much the result of expediency as it is creativity, designed to accommodate small off-cuts of glass, as opposed to large sheets.”

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November 28, 2023
The English Gardener’s Garden, Phaidon’s Gorgeous New Book

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

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