Review by New York Times Review
WHEN I was the editor of House & Garden, I was often asked what every gardener should have on her shelves. Contrary to popular belief, gardeners are bookish sorts - all those fallow winters, you know. It just so happens that this holiday season, publishers are offering a whole library's worth of collectibles. How would we be able to get through the cold, dark season without garden porn? (Warm Texas readers, please wipe the smug smiles off your faces.) You've heard of "starchitects"? Well, meet a stardener - a British phenom, naturally. Americans aren't yet so smitten with horticulture. Dan Pearson's intimate HOME GROUND: Sanctuary in the City (Conran Octopus, $29.99) has the genial tone of a journal. It's about the making of Pearson's own garden in London, which took years, when he wasn't busy with television and radio appearances and a frenetic global lecture schedule, to say nothing of designing some of Europe's most beautiful and impressive gardens. Most of us would give our firstborn fritillaria to find the kind of "beauty in the wreckage" he describes in his winter garden. Under the attentive, loving eye of the photographer Howard Sooley, even Pearson's Turkish knife is photogenic. Who knew there was such sensual beauty in as simple an act as saving seed from Stipa barbata? My spirits lifted when Pearson wrote that "designing my own garden was one of the most difficult things I have ever done." There's hope, it seems, for the rest of us. The results of Pearson's labors are breathtaking. In winter, he observes, "the licorice foliage of the Ranunculus ficaria 'Brazen Hussy' is up while the rest of the garden is still slumbering." In our dreams, anyway. Pearson's book will have readers fantasizing about all kinds of fleeting hussies. For more centerfolds - and no staples - reach for the two encyclopedic volumes of THE BOTANICAL GARDEN (Firefly, $89.95 and $75), by Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix. You won't see the trees for the leaves in Volume 1, "Trees and Shrubs," which provides only up-close treatment; the first sentence of each entry gives expected height, not shape. But there's a froth of detail about everything from the shy backsides of sepals (see Rubus) to the jaunty, rosy stamen bunches of the Melaleuca. These books look good just sitting there, but they turn out to be quite clever as well, providing "a new way of looking at plants and gardening from a more botanical viewpoint." If you want to be conversant about genera and families, these volumes will give you a framework. But I'm content simply to let words like Leguminosae and Nymphaeaceae and Woodsiaceae roll around in my mouth like marbles while I ogle photos of sweet peas, water lilies and ferns. While Texans may be congratulating themselves on living in a mild winter clime, might I remind everyone that long-term drought is predicted for that region? (And that in the Northeast we may soon be planting for rain-forest conditions.) The excellently thorough, smart and handsome TIMBER PRESS GUIDE TO SUCCULENT PLANTS OF THE WORLD (Timber Press, $49.95), by Fred Dortort, offers a trove of jewels for a robust, drought-tolerant garden. Mop-headed Coreopsis gigantea cluster like shaggy hippies from the '60s. And there are euphorbias enough to make any Northeastern gardener prickle with envy; the Yemeni spiralis is a head-turner. Will we ever be lucky enough to see a majestic baobab in the United States? They grow over most of the drier parts of Africa and India, but for many of us dreams of the baobab took root when we read "The Little Prince." To weave spells, though, try the spider web sempervivum; Dortort writes that the ancient Romans decorated grave sites with them because their ability to endure the direst conditions "hinted at immortality." A book like this is as restorative as a three-week vacation, minus the hassles with airplanes. Gardeners worrying about water will also appreciate THE GARDENER'S GUIDE TO CACTUS (Timber Press, $24.95, available in early January), by Scott Calhoun, whose subtitle says it all: "The 100 Best Paddles, Barrels, Columns and Globes." It offers a clear, helpful, well-presented text - trust me, this is an art form all too often neglected in garden books - along with reliable design suggestions. The book that belongs on every serious gardener's Shelf is DIRR'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TREES AND SHRUBS (Timber Press, $79.95). Already there, you say? But this is a new, spruced-up edition of the bible of the industry, with a cleaner design, wipeable cover, newly introduced plants and changes in plant names. Just in time for another generation of gardeners, Michael A. Dirr's encyclopedia is as charming as it is refined. Even the captions are full of personality. You can almost hear the car engine idling after Dirr has screeched to a halt to take pictures of a barberry he "did not even know existed." Dirr inspires because he cuts out mystification, and because he's so reliable. "Firs and heat are akin to cats and dogs," he reports; "they simply do not socialize well." Over the years, I've enjoyed getting to know this writer through the asides tucked into his plant observations. Trailing arbutus "has followed Bonnie and me from our graduate student days at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to Athens." That would be Athens in Georgia, where a professorship in his name has been established at the state university in recognition of his accomplishments. (Dirr is too modest to include this information.) I gasped when I read in the introduction that his grown daughter had died a few years ago with cystic fibrosis. His garden gave him and his wife solace: "Bonnie and I find inner peace with each other and in the garden. . . . There is joy in nurturing and loving living things to their greatest genetic potential." For gardeners bereft of gardens, a tiny book may save your soul: TERRARIUM CRAFT (Timber Press, paper, $18.95), by Amy Bryant Aiello and Kate Bryant, with photographs by Kate Baldwin. Aiello and Bryant, who are gardeners in Portland, Ore., have a knack for creating magical moments: succulents arch over dove eggs in a delicate glass orb; fine quartz sand is layered with bands, of white pebbles in a glass jar planted with Cotyledon undulata; maidenhair fern roots in glass flasks; an angel wing begonia sits grandly in a canning jar. There's something touchingly quaint about these creations, though aesthetically they're quite modern. It has to do with the recognition that acreage isn't what makes the gardener, who will always find a patch of dirt into which she can stick at least a pinkie. Gardeners who have been shovel-ready for years are familiar with the pantheon of writers that includes Gertrude Jekyll and Beverley Nichols. But just as there are always tender new shoots, so there are tender new readers ready to curl up fireside with, say, Katharine S. White's "Onward and Upward in the Garden." I find that collection - and I tremble to say this, since it's horticulturally politically incorrect and will surely bring on blight - overrated. Give me the biting wit of Margery Fish or the smart edge of Eleanor Perenyi any day. For readers who have no idea what I'm talking about, here is Elizabeth Barlow Rogers's lovely WRITING THE GARDEN (David R. Godine, $27.95), a collection of two centuries' worth of garden essays. I had forgotten how much I loved Elizabeth von Arnim's 1898 book "Elizabeth and Her German Garden," in which she refers to her insufferably domineering husband as the "Man of Wrath." She takes him to one of her favorite garden spots - but just once, because he "made us feel so small by his blasé behavior that I never invite him now." At one time, there seems to have been some concern about getting American women into the garden. Andrew Jackson Downing writes disdainfully that "they may love to 'potter' a little. . . . They sow some China asters, and plant a few dahlias, and it is all over." I learned that it was Charles Dudley Warner, not his neighbor Mark Twain, who said, "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Part of the fun of anthologies like this is the flash of context. A.A. Milne winks out from the pages by one of my all-time favorites, Beverley Nichols: "At the risk of out-winnying the poo, it must be admitted that I always think flowers know what you are saying about them." The seeds for many a new garden library will be harvested from this slim volume - or it will inspire readers to return to well-worn classics. The glass artist Dale Chihuly is always good for a change of a scene. Before you protest, need I remind you of the age-old tradition of using sculpture to enliven a garden? CHIHULY GARDEN INSTALLATIONS (Abrams, $75), with essays by David Ebony and Tim Richardson, is a weighty compendium of crowd-pleasing work. Bright pink chunks of glass sparkle over lily pads in the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Fla., while leopard-spotted bronze trumpets rise up through the foliage at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis - as close as man will ever get to making flowers. While we can't create flowers, we can create parks. But it's rare that a dense old city will make room for a new public Space. HIGH LINE: The Inside Story of New York City's Park in the Sky (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $29.95) is the personal account of Joshua David and Robert Hammond, who spent a decade rescuing a decaying freight rail structure from demolition and shepherding a brilliant restoration by sheer force of will and heaps of good luck. These two innocents, with no experience in city planning, politics, finance, engineering, horticulture or design, started with a romantic fascination with the 22 unbroken blocks of elevated tracks: "The rusting Art Deco railings gave it a sense of lost beauty, and the spaces underneath were very dramatic; they had a dark, gritty, industrial quality, and a lofty, church-like quality as well." The tracks ran for a mile and a half through Manhattan and were seeded profusely with wildflowers and trees. During their first visit "we had to wade through waisthigh Queen Anne's lace." The men met at a community board meeting devoted to a discussion of the possible demolition of the eyesore. David sat next to Hammond "because I thought he was cute." Within months they had business cards and a logo and were gathering high-profile Chelsea neighbors to their cause. Alex von Furstenberg signed on: "He was just so handsome and friendly, and he had an amazing body." I chuckled, reading this most unusual take on city planning. Imagine what kind of notes might have come out of Olmsted's office if everyone had been so frank. "Gayness ultimately became an identifying characteristic of the organization and, to some degree, of the park itself." That thought alone - from the Stonewall riots to the High Line in less than 50 years - should occupy social historians for generations. The book chronicles mishaps: Hammond gives Amanda Burden, of the City Planning Commission, the wrong address for her first site visit, and leaves her "standing in the snow for almost an hour." Miracles abound : a one-line e-mail from Barry Diller announced that his family "had decided to make a $10 million challenge gift." David and Hammond's efforts paid off handsomely for New York, as the park achieved iconic stature even before it opened. Its surprisingly rugged, blowzy plantings resonate with its derelict past. Speaking of gayness, there's not a whisper of the Ramble's reputation as a place for homosexual encounters in THE RAMBLE IN CENTRAL PARK: A Wilderness West of Fifth (Abbeville, $35), Robert A. McCabe's book of splendidly soulful photographs of my favorite part of Central Park. Olmsted envisioned this wooded, winding, watery section as "the perfect realization of the wild garden." A ramble through it is indeed disconcerting in the heart of city - there are no signs, paths twist and turn, plantings are dense and vistas are often obscured, so the visitor is disoriented. All the better to marvel at the rocky outcroppings, the leaf litter that carpets the ground with brilliant color in autumn, the gorge transformed by snow in a blizzard. When America was young, people found public oases of tranquillity in cemeteries rather than parks. After GreenWood, in Brooklyn, was founded in 1838, its nearly 500 acres became a great tourist attraction, rivaling Niagara Falls. After 9/11, Allison Cobb, traumatized by the attack, began visiting this "sylvan still life" regularly. Her haunted explorations inspired a gorgeous, subtle, idiosyncratic gem. GREEN-WOOD (Factory School, paper, $15) is a meditation on consolation, war, private enclosures and public grief. It's written in fragments. Shards of poetry glint from the prose like the pieces of metal - commemorative "dog tags" offered to soldiers, their bodies returned from Operation Iraqi Freedom for burial - that lie beside some of the graves. Often late for work because of visits to the glacial ponds to watch an egret fishing, Cobb wants "to possess this creature." As she walks through an arboreal "room of green light," she keeps company across time with other writers. She lingers in a grove of giant tulip trees and thinks of Whitman, who was also fond of lying under a great oak: "On his 60th birthday, Whitman dreamed his favorite trees came walking toward him." About grieving, she reminds us of Emerson's admonition to keep our internal "noisy, sensual savage" down. She makes ritualized lists of the detritus of grief, what she calls "the juicy intervals I encounter" - "MERRY CHRISTMAS IN HEAVEN ribbon"; "DADDY WE MISS YOU pumpkin"; the "HAPPY BIRTHDAY IN HEAVEN balloon wrecked on a branch." Andrew Jackson Downing, whose principles are reflected in the layout of Green-Wood, envisioned our nation, Cobb recalls, "as a vast Eden sculpted by individual property owners." Cobb works her way through the idea of ownership, whether of trees or grief, while this special place works its own way toward healing her. There's nothing wrong with a reminder that we don't just have gardens, we have a Garden of Eden. Or we once did. Judging by the sheer numbers of trees dying to become books about trees, I sense a growing unease about our alienation from the forest world - and a desire to reconnect with it. My favorite new book this season is SEEING TREES: Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees (Timber Press, $29.95), by Nancy Ross Hugo with photographs by Robert Llewellyn. This book is made for us nearsighted gardeners, who long ago learned the thrill of peering at plants. Like all good books, it's the product of personal obsession - with what was growing in the authors' backyards. They urge readers to examine their pictures of "the hair, veins, pores and other wildly vivifying tree characteristics." It is, indeed, mind-boggling to gaze at the shredded ball gown of pink bracts below the new leaves of a shagbark hickory or the runway of purple and yellow stripes beckoning pollinators to the catalpa. Richard Avedon's fashion shoots came to mind as I gazed at the blowup of a sycamore ball. I also made my peace with the ankle-twisting but charismatic fruit of the sweet gum tree. And finally learned what on earth that chartreuse softball-size fruit was that I had kicked around for years while out walking - the Osage-orange, fruit that may well have delighted woolly mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths more than 10,000 years ago. Which reminds me to remind you that while humans have been evolving for three million years, trees have been doing it for 397 million. We ought to pay our elders more respect. Indeed, the authors hope that their romance with trees, conveyed with the splendid rapture of lovers (those eyes, those lips, those ears . . . ) will "help make the world safer for trees." TREES AND FORESTS: Wild Wonders of Europe (Abrams, $50), by Florian Möllers, Annick Schnitzler, Staffan Widstrand and , gathers photographs of woods from the Alpine regions to the rain forests of the Canary Islands. I was entranced by the pictures of the Slovakian fire salamander; the European white water lily taken from its underside; and the common kingfisher in a sparkle of droplets, its meal in its beak. On a final note, though it isn't even in the loosest sense a garden book, GAIA (Assouline, $65), by Guy Laliberté, is a mind-bending portrait of our Eden - and a reminder of the importance of the gardener's collective ethos of tender care for our small patches of soil. As Wendell Berry reminds us, "the earth is what we all have in common." Laliberté, the creator of Cirque du Soleil, spent 11 days at the International Space Station, orbiting the earth some 176 times and making gravity-defying photographs. They're a lovely counterpoint to the tiny details of seeds and buds cherished by those who tend the planet below. This is the perfect time to marvel at the blessings of life, laugh at the folly of humankind and anticipate the miracles that will spring up under your trowel next spring. Dominique Browning blogs at SlowLoveLife.com. She is the senior director of MomsCleanAirForce.org, fighting air pollution to protect children's health.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 4, 2012]
Review by Library Journal Review
Few terrarium books have been published in recent years, but many glass gardening enthusiasts persisted past the 1970s, and they will enjoy the 50 projects in this book-updated terrariums evocative of forests, beaches, deserts, and fantasies. Projects break the mold of traditional, covered, humid terrariums and have a modern look even when incorporating antiques or mementos. As in any good craft book, each project includes at least one large, stunning photograph, a materials list, and enumerated directions. Crafty brown thumbs will appreciate the inclusion of maintenance advice for each completed project. The resource list is helpful for locating supplies not found locally, but suggested substitutions are readily given since the authors encourage creativity and spontaneity. Aiello is the owner of Artemisia (a Portland, OR, boutique specializing in indoor gardening) and Bryant is a columnist for Portland Monthly. Some projects incorporate succulents, a plant group excluded from Tovah Martin's The New Terrarium, which offers fewer projects but more thoroughly discusses plants, containers, history, and resources. -VERDICT Recommended for indoor gardeners and crafters alike.-Bonnie Poquette, Milwaukee (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
