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Perennial favorites for home gardeners
REVIEWS BY DEANNA LARSON Hundreds of gardening books shoot up each spring, "bulbs" with seductive text and flashy pictures that quickly fade. But amateur gardeners with small plots and limited budgets will appreciate these hardy perennials—new books that inspire fantasies while earning their keep season after season with solid advice. In living color
By P. Allen Smith Clarkson Potter, $32.50 192 pages ISBN 1400053420
Yankee ingenuity
Collins, $29.95 352 pages ISBN 0060599774
Indoor greenery
By Barbara Pleasant Storey, $24.95 384 pages ISBN 1580175694
Murphy's Law strikes the garden
By William Alexander Algonquin, $22.95 288 pages ISBN 1565125037
Deanna Larson's garden grows in Nashville.
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Mother Nature doesn't need a paint chip to combine colors. Even her most garish combinations, like a field of riotous wild flowers in spring, have a grace and beauty about them that amateur gardeners often find difficult to duplicate. So America's favorite gardener turns timid paint-by-number gardeners into bold and creative artists in P. Allen Smith's Colors for the Garden: Creating Compelling Color Themes. Painting on a "canvas" as large as a backyard can be daunting, so Smith provides his usual reassuring and clear advice, linking home and garden colors to create a harmonious palette using the "garden home" concepts introduced in his previous books such as enclosure, activity, whimsy and abundance. Smith helps gardeners discover their color preferences and incorporate cool, warm and neutral plant hues against the backdrop of walkways, arbors, fences and other hardscape elements. The book also explores how texture, shape and light affect colors, and how to use natural elements as frames for outdoor compositions. Excellent photographs underline Smith's points, and his plant directory features vigorous, easy-care and dependable varieties from shrubs and trees to annuals, along with seasonal combinations in each color "temperature," that can be used as a paint box to create original, living art.
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"The Victory Garden" is the longest-running gardening program on American television, popular for its folksy style and Yankee practicality. Despite new generations of hosts and changes in garden styles, that unpretentious tone has remained refreshingly consistent, especially in books inspired by the show including the latest, The Victory Garden Companion. Released April 1 to coincide with the program's 30th anniversary season on public television, the book covers every basic principle of domestic gardening in a readable, conversational style, from "views and vantage points" and "braving the elements" including sun, wind and rain, to entrances and exits, backyard fixtures and features, an excellent section on lawn (or the lack of necessity for it), flowers, the urban garden and the edible garden, which inspired the series' name. Add step-by-step weekend projects, "Inspired Gardens" features on horticultural highlights from around the world, the "Best Bets" columns such as the top five tools for vegetable gardeners, "Digging Deeper" sections on current gardening trends including heirloom seeds and solar power, lush color illustrations and the reasonable price, and this book becomes black gold for any gardener looking for that perfect combination of how-to and why in one handy volume.
Apparently, Prince Charles was right: talking to plants isn't barmy. As it turns out, however, it's not the words of encouragement that keep the primroses blooming, but the huff of breath while talking to and watering houseplants that helps those routine-lovers adjust to changing wind conditions around the house and garden. This and many other rich tidbits in The Complete Houseplant Survival Manual will convince hapless home gardeners that they can have the many benefits of indoor landscapes without committing horticultural homicide. Here's something the guilt-ridden might like to know, thanks to author Barbara Pleasant: some houseplants are only meant to survive a year or two (whew), many can't cope with dry indoor air without daily help, and even within varieties, plants are like children, each having their own personalities and needing a slightly different approach. That said, this attractive illustrated directory boosts beginners' confidence with a directory of hardy houseplants from cacti and succulents to orchids, bulbs and blooming plants. Pleasant discusses each variety's characteristics and needs including water/humidity, food and light (she has a fantastic method for determining indoor lighting strengths and best plant positions). A handy symbol—a cute flowerpot—also marks the most hardy, abuse-proof houseplants (think Devil's Ivy) to ensure that even novices can have immediate success.
What gardener doesn't indulge in schadenfreude from the smug perch of an armchair in early spring, before their own epic mistakes come to roost in their exotics? The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for a Perfect Garden is a delicious ride through one man's seriocomic horticultural adventure: to create the most impressive garden ever to set off his historic, rundown old heap of a house in New York's Hudson Valley. And that man, William Alexander—husband, father and director of technology by day—meets his emotional and intellectual match while cultivating a few acres of fruits, vegetables, roses and cottage flowers. Encountering the "jolly" act of weeding more than 20 beds and trying to figure out how the sod mealworms got up the hill to his corn, his transformation to gentleman farmer well-versed in Murphy's Law is presented in chapters including "One Man's Weed Is Jean-Georges's Salad," "Nature Abhors a Meadow (But Loves a Good Fire)," "Statuary Rape," and "Whore in the Bedroom, Horticulturist in the Garden." As Alexander cans peaches, learns to garden with his wife ("like trying to grow mint and horseradish in the same bed"), fights Japanese beetles and works with a gardener who looks and acts suspiciously like the actor Christopher Walken, readers will relate to his basic philosophical dilemma: am I becoming my garden, or is my garden becoming me? Through follies and mistakes and temper tantrums and bad decisions that reveal more about personality and character than he'd like to admit (this "committed environmentalist" once soaked his vegetables in the pesticide diazinon in a fit over bugs), Alexander is eventually humbled and awed by Mother Nature's final word, always delivered without anger or acrimony.