Air Plants, by Zenaida Sengo, the interior coordinator at the popular San Francisco-based Flora Grubb Gardens, shows how simple and rewarding it is to grow, craft, and design with these modern beauties. Decorating with air plants is made easy with stunning photographs that showcase ideas for using them mounted on walls, suspended from the ceiling, as living bows and jewelry, as screens, and in unique containers, like leather pouches, dishes, and baskets. Six step-by-step projects include a wood mount, a wall hook, lasso-and-hook wiring, a ceramic-frame garden, and three unique terrariums.
Although the garden may beckon as strongly as ever, the tasks involved pulling weeds, pushing wheelbarrows, digging holes, moving heavy pots become increasingly difficult, or even impossible, with advancing age. But the idea of giving it up is unthinkable for most gardeners. So what?s the alternative, in "Gardening for a Lifetime?, now in paperback, Sydney Eddison draws on her own forty years of gardening to provide a practical and encouraging roadmap for scaling back while keeping up with the gardening activities that each gardener loves most. Like replacing demanding plants like delphiniums with sturdy, relatively carefree perennials like sedums, rudbeckias, and daylilies. Or taking the leap and hiring help another pair of hands, even for a few hours a week, goes a long way toward getting a big job done. Or maybe it makes sense to get rid of high-maintenance trees, shrubs, or perennials. The paperback edition features a new chapter in which Sydney's struggles with hip and back problems force her to walk the walk. As a friend of hers says, "Last summer you wrote the book. Now, I'm happy to see that you've read it". Gentle, personable, and practical, "Gardening for a Lifetime" will be welcomed by all gardeners looking to transform gardening from a list of daunting chores into the rewarding, joy-filled activity it was meant to be.
Augustus Jenkins Farmer (aka Jenks) started gardening in the third grade in a corner of the family farm filled with rocks, scrap metal, crinum, and spider lilies. He was free to dig, transplant, and design in any way he wanted by making do with what he had. Thirty years later, he continues to garden this way in his own gardens in Columbia and Beech Island, South Carolina. His style of gardening is in stark contrast to the gardening industry's steady stream of new products, new advertising, and new rules that create unneeded complexities, intimidating future gardeners and obscuring the joy of gardening. Deep-Rooted Wisdom is Farmer's antidote to this corporate-driven model of gardening. In it he shares the traditional skills and techniques he has learned over the years from generations of gardeners, like gardening with pass-along plants, harnessing the natural power of worms and mushrooms, saving heirloom seeds, and making handmade garden structures out of available materials. Along the way, he introduces us to a cast of unforgettable characters, like Yvrose Valdez, a woman from Haiti who uses legumes in lieu of fertilizer, and Bennett Baxley, who has a 20-acre yard filled almost entirely with scavenged plants. "Deep-Rooted Wisdom" is garden mentorship at its best and most honest, showing us all a way back to a more joyful, simple style of gardening.
People everywhere are turning patches of soil into bountiful vegetable gardens, and each spring a new crop of beginners pick up trowels and plant seeds for the first time. They're planting tomatoes in raised beds, runner beans in small plots, and strawberries in containers. But there is one place that has, until now, been woefully neglected the front yard. And there's good reason. The typical veggie garden, with its raised beds and plots, is not the most attractive type of garden, and favorite edible plants like tomatoes and cucumbers have a tendency to look a scraggily, even in their prime. But "The Edible Front Yard" isn't about the typical veggie garden, and author Ivette Soler is passionate about putting edibles up front and creating edible gardens with curb appeal. Soler offers step-by-step instructions for converting all or part of a lawn into an edible paradise; specific guidelines for selecting and planting the most attractive edible plants; and design advice and plans for the best placement and for combining edibles with ornamentals in pleasing ways. Inspiring and accessible, "The Edible Front Yard" is a one-stop resource for a front-and-center edible garden that is both beautiful and bountiful all year-round.