A way to garden A hands-on primer for every season

Margaret Roach

Book - 2019

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

635/Roach
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 635/Roach Checked In
Subjects
Published
Portland, Oregon : Timber Press 2019.
Language
English
Main Author
Margaret Roach (author)
Physical Description
319 pages : color illustrations ; 27 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (page 291) and index.
ISBN
9781604698770
  • Preface: And Now, 21 Years Later
  • Introduction: Beyond Outdoor Decorating
  • Conception January And February
  • New Cycle, A New Season
  • Studying the Catalogs
  • Early, Middle, Late
  • Look Out the Window: Design 101
  • Planning, on Paper or Otherwise
  • Journals: Writing It All Down
  • Zones and Other Considerations
  • Taxonomy Lite
  • Say What? Speaking Latin
  • Hybrid, Heirloom, or Both?
  • Seed Viability versus Vigor
  • First Sowing: Onions and Leeks
  • Saying No to Deer
  • Pruning, Pared Way Down
  • Intermediate Witch Hazels
  • Hellebores Galore
  • Plants with Structure
  • Birth March And April
  • Groundhog Day
  • Gardening for the Birds
  • Powerhouse Bird Plants
  • When to Start Seeds
  • 18 Seed-Starting Tips
  • Why Seedlings Stretch and Get Spindly
  • Making a Bed, with Cardboard
  • How to Shop for Plants (and Not)
  • Ephemerals
  • Dividing Trilliums
  • Planting Peas, with Mendel in Mind
  • Hydrangea Pruning
  • My Gold Foliage Issue
  • Forsythia Alternatives
  • Animal-Resistant Flower Bulbs
  • The Ever-Reliable Narcissus
  • Pruning Clematis
  • A Particular Pulmonaria
  • Finding Room for More Natives
  • What is Native Where?
  • Spring Water-Garden Regimen
  • Name Game: Know Your Weeds
  • Youth May and June 125
  • A Season for Sisterhood
  • Nuisance Wildlife
  • Tough-Love Transplanting
  • Editing Self-Sowns
  • 13 Things About Growing Tomatoes
  • Salad Days
  • Sow, Sow, Sow Again
  • Investment Plants
  • Ornamental Onions
  • Fumitories and Aroids, Oh My
  • Euphorbias
  • Ferns
  • Peonies
  • A Moment for Lilacs
  • Making Mosaics (Underplanting)
  • Confidence Builders, Rethought
  • A Must-Have Rose
  • Water Garden in a Pot
  • Organic Lawn Care
  • Mulch Wisdom
  • Growing Potatoes
  • Adulthood July And August
  • Throwing in the Trowel
  • Fall Vegetable Garden
  • A Few Good Living Mulches
  • Meadow Plants, Mowing Strategies
  • Cutbacks
  • Fetid but Fantastic Eucomis
  • Southeast Native, Northeast Garden
  • Weavers and See-Throughs
  • Insect Love (or at Least Respect)
  • Foliage, the Garden's Wardrobe
  • Squash Madness
  • Viburnums
  • Not Your Average Morning Glories
  • Tall Perennials
  • Houttuynia, and Other Weeds I Planted
  • Senescence September And October
  • Nothing Lasts
  • Fall Leaves and Pink Mums
  • Repeat After Me
  • Making Compost
  • A Longer Clematis Season
  • When Inner Conifer Needles Turn Brown
  • Putting Up a Year of Herbs
  • I Just Call Them Asters
  • Cover Crops: Feeding the Soil
  • Smarter Bulb Shopping and Planting
  • Eranthis, the Winter Aconite
  • A Nectaroscordum by Any Name
  • Saving Seeds
  • How to Grow Garlic
  • Storing and Preserving Garlic
  • A Saner Fall Cleanup
  • Mad Stash: Overwintering Tender Plants
  • Taking the Year's Inventory
  • Death And Afterlife November And December
  • Dear Friend (Love, Margaret)
  • The Asset of Bark
  • Cultivating Snags, or Wildlife Trees
  • Winterizing the Water Garden
  • Winterberry Hollies
  • Willing Houseplants
  • Conifers I Have Known
  • My Seed-Shopping Rules
  • A Wheelbarrow Full of Prevention
  • References and Sources
  • Acknowledgments
  • Photo Credits
  • Index
Review by New York Times Review

I was recently honored with an introduction to a beguiling new baby; her name is Selah, a mysterious Hebrew word that appears mostly in the Psalms. "Selah" is considered untranslatable. Perhaps it's a musical notation, calling for a break in the singing of those gorgeous sacred songs, or it could be an invitation for instruments to join in; it might also relay an emphatic amen, a "forever," or be an exclamation of praise. Whatever its meaning, it seems to invite a pause - to open up a space for the contemplation of what lingers in the air. The word "selah" was on my mind as 1 pored over the season's gardening books, each one of which, in its own way, exhorts the reader to stop and reflect on what happens when we put ourselves back into the natural world. Margaret Roach describes such moments of joy, refreshment and wonder in the indispensable a way to garden: a Hands-On Primer for Every Season (Timber, $30), a rewritten edition of a book she first published 21 years ago about her garden in the Hudson Valley. Roach's approach is a combination, as she puts it, of "know-how and woo-woo"; she lives surrounded by "life buzzing to the maximum and also the deepest stillness." Gardens are a form of memoir. Roach surveys all that has changed in three decades, including the "it" plants now considered invasive. (She deftly uses the word "hoicking" to describe tearing out unwanted scoundrels she once nurtured.) Tissue culture labs have proliferated and oncerare plants are available at big box stores; cherished nurseries have closed. Pests are proliferating, and weather becomes more unpredictable and extreme as our climate rapidly changes. Worms aren't the blessing we thought they were (there were no native earthworms in the northern United States); some, like the jumping worms from Asia, are destructive, not only to our gardens but to our forest ecologies as well. But all is not sadness: Roach now participates in bigdata collection, logging her bird and moth counts online. With her garden containing comic multitudes of frogs and snakes, she has learned to control her phobias. Trees have grown larger than her house. Her garden has become the place "where 1 can be myself." The book is organized by season, and contains instructions on planting, dividing, mulching and designing. Everyone needs the kind of friend Roach has, who looks up from your kitchen sink and asks if you really like "looking at the door of your car every day?" That's as good a place as any to start laying out a plan. Though "A Way to Garden" will be embraced by longtime tillers, 1 highly recommend it to new gardeners. Experienced veg-hounds will nod in agreement with Roach's "13 Things About Growing Tomatoes" - and be thankful for her instructions for skins-on tomato sauce to freeze. Roach, a natural teacher, rightly loves rules: With knowhow, you're halfway to winning the battle. One of her recent New Year's resolutions was simple: "Be thoughtful, keep weeding." Which brings us to the "woo-woo." ft peeks through every page, in dazzling photographs of algae-smeared frogs and curious snakes and a few of the 179 moth species she has identified so far. But the "woo-woo" goes much deeper. "The longer 1 live in Nowheresville, with its intimate window on the natural world," she writes, "the better 1 grasp my kindredness with other local species." "A Way to Garden" - sensitive, wise, deliberate, thoughtful and splendidly bossy - prods us toward that ineffable place where we feel we belong; it's a guide to living both in and out of the garden. New gardeners who don't want to lose years (and dollars) figuring things out for themselves would do well to invest in Alan Buckingham's the kitchen garden (dk, paper, $24.99). ft's the most straightforward and informative guide I've seen in a while, from a publisher that has a knack for elegant simplicity. Buckingham offers clear, simple, well-illustrated advice for month-by-month care: Harvest your first rhubarb and your last brussels sprouts in March; sow your broad beans, cauliflower and peas in October; cloche your endives in December. When it comes time to prune your trees and shrubs, don't make a cut without consulting pruning simplified: a Visual Guide to 50 Trees and Shrubs (Timber, paper, $19.95), by Steven Bradley, who offers instructions for formative, routine and, most useful in old gardens, remedial cutting for plants that have become leggy and unproductive. Neophytes should also park near their wheelbarrows a copy of the impeccable beginner gardening step by step (dk, paper, $22.99). Those of us who have been gardening for decades forget how overwhelming it is to confront things in your yard that have a will of their own. This volume will be a gift to every millennial on my list - all of whom refused to pay attention when 1 tried to trick them into gardening so many years ago. If you build that garden, they will come - the birds, the bees and the butterflies. 1 have added lots of unruly but fragrant fennel to my beds just for the thrill of watching the stained-glass wings of swallowtails morph from dapper dotted and striped caterpillars. There are innumerable guides to identifying these beauties, wings in the light: Wild Butterflies in North America (Yale University, $35), by the photographer and writer David Lee Myers, will make you fall in love first. Myers's assured photographs are beautiful; he bears witness to the depredations of a fragile winged life, which can last from a few weeks to a few seasons; delicate hairs are worn down, wings are tattered, legs crumple and curl. Myers somberly memorializes a smashed Pipevine Swallowtail, killed in Texas when it hit the windshield of his car. Butterfly habitats tend to be "inconspicuous or 'brushy' or 'weedy,' " Myers writes, and thus we don't protect them. Don't even get me started on our flagrant overuse of insecticides. Collectively, we "grievously wound Nature," and this is not only disastrous for the butterflies but, as Myers makes clear, disastrous for humanity too. "If there's a secret here, it's in slow seeing," he declares. "In slow seeing with quick eyes." Once you've got things blooming, take joy in armfuls of flowers for your table. Stuff them insouciantly into jam jars, if you will, but there can also be loads of artifice in that art form. BLOOMS: Contemporary Floral Design (Phaidon, $49.95) is an international survey. Here are blooms to bedazzle. How glad I am for creative souls like Emily Thompson of New York, whose imagination unspools to intricately bind up devil's walking stick, wild fennel, snake garlic scapes, turkscap lilies - and octopus. Or Flora Starkey, from London, who achieves a pristine chic with white tulips marching across a table in glass bottles. Katie Marx, an Australian, strings voile hammocks, swollen-bellied with red tulips, from the ceiling, while Lauren Sellen, of Coyote Flowers in Ontario, wraps a model in pink gauze and mauve hydrangeas. A man vomits dahlias into a toilet for Lisa Waud of Pot + Box in Detroit; in Tokyo, the showman Azuma Makoto encases flowers in enormous blocks of ice or burns them in pyrotechnic performance art. Here are blooms serving political purposes and blooms that are unabashedly decadent. Mere mortals can be forgiven our bunches of daisies, sloshing in glasses of water. Sometimes body and soul crave the quiet depths of green shade. Tree lovers, rejoice. The inimitable Michael A. Dirr has teamed up with Keith S. Warren to give us the tree book (Timber, $79.95). My copy of the classic "Dirr's Hardy Trees and Shrubs," from 1997, is a repository of desire, the pages ruffled with Post-it notes for fantasies of long-ago gardens. Then and now, the authors make the case for better planting in our "urban forests." Driving around cities, they notice trees that are diseased, uncomfortable or just plain wrong. Their monumental tome will be invaluable for landscape designers, urban planners and homeowners. You can zip straight through from Abies alba to Ziziphus jujuba, though I found it impossible not to get diverted; I got no further than Clethra barbinervis before I began planting a new generation of sticky notes. The authors' voices boom through, with prose that's lively and full of character. "The patriarch of Carya species," they write of the shagbark hickory, "almost inspires love at first sight, with its earthy steadfastness." Of Elaeagnus angustifolia, the notorious Russian olive, Dirr and Warren observe: "Let's start with the bad. This plant is invasive in 31 states. ... We wish it had been left in Russia." Water hickory is "a sleeper in the magical world of Carya" and the Kentucky coffee tree sends them into raptures: "To sit beneath one is a religious experience to a tree lover: The structure feels massive like an ancient cathedral, yet its foliage is as elegant as the stained-glass windows. We love this tree." May there be a contagion of such love. A few years back, Peter Wohlleben published a most unlikely best seller in which he provocatively (and controversially) discussed the ways in which trees communicate with one another, throwing off chemical and electrical impulses to warn their neighbors of stress and danger. Recently rereleased in abridged form as the hidden life of TREES: The Illustrated Version (Greystone, $35), accompanied by lavish photographs, it's an excellent introduction to a growing field of scientific understanding of what's actually going on in those "brainlike structures" found at the tips of a tree's roots. The "well-being" of trees "depends on their community," he argues - words that don't describe our urban forests, much less ourselves, although they ought to. Trees create their own ecosystems, love their saplings, won't abandon their dead. We're just beginning to appreciate these wondrously tangled communities. Wohlleben's book about trees was the first installment in what is now a trilogy called The Mysteries of Nature. In the second volume, "The Inner Life of Animals," Wohlleben upends our assumptions about the world outside our bodies as he observes love, grief and compassion among animals. The final installment is the secret wisdom OF NATURE: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things (Greystone, $24.95). Here we read about the relationship between trees and fish, and how wolves and ravens share meat because the ravens keep watch for marauding bears. Wohlleben shares the story of a crow that thanked him for bird seed by leaving gifts on a fence rail. On the question of bird migration - are birds genetically (mechanistically) programmed for certain routes or do they learn from older birds? - Wohlleben reports on cranes that appear to decide collectively to alter their routes depending on the availability of food and breeding grounds. By the end of the book, it's clear that it's we humans who are extraordinary, in ways awful and awesome, dominating and exploiting the natural world, ceaselessly, ruthlessly, with little sense that we're imperiling ourselves and the generations to come. The balance Wohlleben describes isn't extraordinary, nor does it spring from wisdom. It's simply the real nature of life, an entangled, intermingled mess of overlap, reliance, symmetry, chaos, resilience and interdependence - the whole grand mess, lost to us when we stop seeing nature. But then someone with the compassion, generosity, curiosity, intensity and, yes, wisdom of Wohlleben reopens our eyes. I would never have guessed that someone could write an entire book about the coppicing of trees, much less that I'd find myself pleasurably immersed in what I (wrongly) thought was arcana, but, then again, any subject the poetical William Bryant Logan tackles is guaranteed to be rich and surprising. All serious gardeners should own my personal favorite (until now), "Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth." SPROUT LANDS: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees (Norton, $27.95) is a memoir of Logan's rediscovery of an ancient way of pruning trees - long out of favor, though in the rarefied circles of landscape designers, that is thankfully changing. It all started with a job. Logan is an arborist, and his firm was hired to pollard new trees in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He wasn't really sure how to proceed with this highly visible task; both pollarding and coppicing involve heavy but selective regular cutting of major branches so they sprout thick new growth the next spring. May is "the time when the coppice springs," hence our term "springtime." People once lived with nature in "creative engagement," Logan writes, and this method preserved trees while giving people all they needed to make kindling, baskets, fences and other important tools. "In coppice and pollard, both people and trees were reciprocally active." Entire forests were once coppiced, and coppicing was practiced around the globe. Logan sought out experts to learn these pruning techniques in Spain, Japan and California. In Japan, he visits a small factory where every year four square kilometers of woodland are cut to make about 20,000 tons of charcoal. The University of California, Berkeley, is, he reports, "awash in pollarded London planes." Archaeologists have studied Neolithic settlements in what are now Prance, Switzerland and Germany and have deduced that coppicing led to the invention of streets. Because it's a way of harvesting that leaves root in the ground, coppicing protects wildlife and prevents soil erosion. In ancient days, Logan notes with characteristically wry profundity, people "knew what was good for them better than we do." The naturalist Sy Montgomery offers remediation in her charming HOW TO BE A GOOD CREATURE: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $20). She IS the author of books about tigers, octopuses, dolphins and apes, among others. In her memoir, Montgomery makes vividly explicit what she has learned from the animals with whom she has shared her life. As a child, Montgomery mortified her socially ambitious mother by insisting that she be called "Pony," as she believed she was really a horse. She dressed a stuffed baby caiman in doll clothes and pushed it around in a pram. She revered Jane Goodall and her famous chimp studies. And by the time she was 26, the sight of three six-foot-tall emus in the Australian outback had set her on her life's path: "leaving all that I loved behind" to conduct field research on wild animals. Atiny pig with a big personality teaches her that it's O.K. to be different. Clarabelle, a friendly tarantula, as "immaculate" as a cat, visits a schoolroom in Trench Guiana on Montgomery's husband's hand. "Elle est belle, le monstre," one little girl murmurs, getting over her fear. Montgomery's description of the octopus Octavia's death, and the way she said farewell by gently but firmly attaching suckers to Montgomery's arm, brought me near tears. "You never know, even when life looks hopeless, what might happen next," Montgomery writes. And here we must pause. Selah: Pause to acknowledge that we are receiving altogether too many signals of stress and danger. Selah: Pause to ponder the complex, miraculous web of life that we inhabit. Selah: Pause to welcome a new generation, picking up wherever we leave off, learning to get back to the garden. May all our tree-huggers and animal lovers, all our writers and thinkers, hands and hearts deep in the soil (or tickling the backs of spiders), help us to see how we too might become better creatures. DOMINIQUE BROWNING, formerly the editor of House & Garden, is the founder and director of Moms Clean Air Force. She is an associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

Readers may know Roach (The Backyard Parables, 2013) from her previous books, her work as garden editor for Martha Stewart Living, and her podcast and website that share this book's title. This new edition of Roach's classic 1998 guide to home gardening is updated throughout and reflects a philosophy informed by what she's learned through the years about the value of native plants and the harm caused by invasives as well as current information in the realms of pests, diseases, the seed industry, and climate change. Following the calendar year interpreted as a life cycle, this book starts with plant conception and moves through birth, youth, adulthood, and senescence to death and afterlife. Roach's conversational tone showcases her personal experiences while highlighting important horticultural information, making it a compelling book to read straight through that is also useful as a reference for particular details. Her book's title affirms that Roach sees her work as one of many possible methodologies and that even the experts are always learning. Readers will appreciate Roach's focus on gardening as a way anyone can help make the world a better place and her approach, combining horticultural how-to and woo-hoo (her term), which balances precise learned information with one's own intuition.--Anne Heidemann Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Roach (The Backyard Parables), former gardening editor for Martha Stewart Living magazine, thoughtfully and thoroughly updates her 1998 guide to organic, year-round gardening. As Roach notes, it is "still titled A Way to Garden because it is not the only way, just my way." She moves through the year in two-month increments, each identified with different phases of life, from conception to death, and opens every section on a personal note, such as about her changing relationship with her sister or memories of "the first gardener I ever knew," her grandmother. These snippets of memoir are followed by lists of seasonal chores (including learning all the proper Latin plant names), practical advice ("Always go inside and look out the window before digging a single hole"), and best practices (for lawns, Roach keeps grass long and leaves the clippings). Throughout, she reflects on her evolving understanding of the impact of seed genetics, importance of native plants, and increasingly unpredictable weather, among other topics. Filled with expert and sometimes highly specialized information-such as about water gardens-this book is less a "how to" for novices than a meditation on "why to" for veterans. Those with dirt already under their fingernails will treasure Roach's in-depth knowledge, wry humor, and reflective look at how seasons in gardening mirror the passage of time. With color photos. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Preface My how times have changed. Though at first thought, the idea of rekindling a 21-year-old garden book might not seem like a task as radical or needed as, say, redoing one of the same vintage about computers, it turns out otherwise. Yes, we still use shovels (if not Word 6.0; I'm now pecking away on version 16.16.2). Yes, the horticultural operating system still begins with "green side up," though I did recently gift a friend some paperwhite narcissus to force, forgetting to state what seemed to me the obvious. I got a call a few weeks later asking why white spaghetti was sprouting from the pot. And one more yes, before we get to all the nos. Were they alive, my money's on the likelihood that Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein would still be discussing the most perennial of evergreen garden topics: The story goes that Toklas once asked Stein what she saw when she closed her eyes. "Weeds," Stein replied. Me, too; now and forever, I forecast that the gardener shall forevermore have plants growing in the wrong place, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Help! Much else has been upended, I came to realize as I dug in to revise the book. No, mere updates would not do, Margaret. The catalog sources at the back of the first edition are now mostly fond memories of old friends long gone from the business. (Their progeny live on in my garden, and I still unearth the occasional old plastic label, the printing so faded as to be nearly illegible.) Some "it" plants of that moment that everyone grew (or wanted to, if only they could secure a piece) are now known thugs, and I, like gardeners everywhere, will spend the rest of my days hoicking them out, sometimes losing the battle. Their tenacity is an in-our-faces, perennial reminder of inadvertent environmental wrongdoing--of cultivating what proved to become invasives. Plants that were rare--a dramatic variegated- or gold-leaf version some savvy gardener identified from a sport, perhaps--stayed that way a relatively long while. The ramp up to wider distribution was once upon a time dictated by the math of the plant's inclination to set seed or provide ample divisions or cuttings. As tissue culture laboratories have proliferated, and the secrets of micropropagation, or cloning, for more species unlocked, the pace for many plants has likewise accelerated. Advancements in other methods of mass production, like of wholesale baby plants called liners or plugs, has evolved, too, in ever more mechanized greenhouse facilities. You barely have time to gloat over being among the first to have something special, before it confronts you en masse at the big-box store. I knew, and grew, some native plants back then--notably winterberry hollies and asters--but our current collective consciousness about the role of natives, about habitat gardening and pollinator gardening, had not taken hold. Today native status is even printed on plant labels (though often imprecisely, since few things are native to the entire nation). The word "nativar," for a cultivar of a native plant with showier attributes or a different habit than the straight species, has been added to the vocabulary. Ticks were familiar, but those tiny arachnids hadn't yet traumatized a chunk of the nation. Our longtime No. 1 annual, the impatiens, hadn't been assaulted by a devastating fungus-like disease called impatiens downy mildew, and a related species of DM hadn't yet attacked beloved basil. (As I type this, news is just out that the impatiens genome "sequence and assembly" has been cracked, a critical step in developing a strategy to breed in resistance someday to DM.) And so many introduced forest pests have increased their pressure: The ever-wider encroachment of hemlock woolly adelgid, as one example, saw to it in these ensuing years that I would not dare plant Tsuga. Instead I mourn former stands of what was a foundation species of the northeastern forests I live surrounded by. Even the earthworm has evolved from being regarded as a gardener's (and farmer's) best friend to a leading suspect in environmental havoc. I didn't even know years back that there were no native earthworms in the northern United States--that they were all introduced species (including many kinds in warmer regions). And nobody knew just how destructive some of the latest imports, notably jumping worms from Asia in the genera Amynthas and Metaphire, would prove to gardens, yes, but to forest ecologies most terrifyingly, as they impoverish soil and interrupt the process of succession in parts of the Great Lakes Forest, the Great Smoky Mountains, and New England. We will be hearing more about them regularly, I forecast. Need I mention that the gardener's other once-reliable companion, the weather, doesn't seem very friendly or familiar at all, either, as the climate shifts? The expected meteorological pacing of each space of a season is no longer, and all the time we face extremes that are ever more perplexing to manage around. As unsettling to keen gardeners (and to a greater degree, farmers) has been consolidation of the seed industry, as seed genetics became regarded as intellectual property--something to patent and own. The number of players has shrunk to a few giants, and their focus is on money-makers--genetically engineered agribusiness crops, yes, and also classically bred hybrids suited to large-scale farming because of their uniformity, perhaps, or inclination to ripen all at once for ease of harvest. Some heirloom home-garden seeds that didn't have such profit potential got neglected, but, blessedly, counterforces have risen up to protect and reinvigorate some of them. I didn't know years back that my garden would become a laboratory for data collection. Though I was interested in science--something the garden opened up for me in a way no high school teacher ever had--I was not yet one of what are now millions of citizen scientists who today record backyard observations, adding my bird counts and moth counts and more to giant databases that scientists can use for research (but could not compile without us). In the old text of the book, I could hear the first hints of the gardener, and person, I would become. I met a Margaret who was, as I am now, devoted to organic practices, and already proselytizing. I also met one-time friends, plants that starred in the first edition but have since gone--not because they all died, but because my enthusiasms shifted. For example, once mad for silver, I'm now all about the gold (leaves, that is). A younger Margaret shared joyful anecdotes of interactions with the first birds she came to know, and an apparent delight at a growing number of beneficial insects, too, as her deepening sense of connection to the bigger picture took hold. Missing in the original book were amphibian adventure stories, as their populations in the garden have multiplied to almost comical proportion, and I have undergone the metamorphosis into She Who Lives with Frogs. I likewise failed then to celebrate my reptilian brethren--to trumpet how important it is to make snakes at home in an organic garden. There is good reason for that last oversight: I was not yet a recovering ophidiophobiac. Quite to the contrary. Today, I describe my approach to gardening as "horticultural how-to and 'woo-woo'"--a blend of stuff you need to memorize, like how deep to plant a daffodil bulb, and stuff you need to feel when you witness a seed germinating, for instance, and just surrender to (like getting over a fear of snakes, and instead of screaming, thanking them for eating slugs and mice). I was glad I could hear both how-to and woo-woo notes in the old Margaret, and my nowadays constant invocation to strive for a 365-day garden was evident, if not labeled yet as such. I guess I am still me (or always was?). One more thing, or actually two, have not changed even a little. First, I garden because I cannot help myself. I hope that you may feel that calling. Most of all: this book is still titled A Way to Garden because it is not the only way, just my way. It's the one way I have gradually sorted out despite all the shifts in trends and technology and even the taxonomic order of things, as tried-and-true plants were renamed (and sometimes then unrenamed for dizzying good measure). Whatever pest or predicament is thrown at me, onward I do dig, and most of all: weed. Perhaps mine is a way to garden that will work for you, too. I hope so. Excerpted from A Way to Garden: A Hands-on Primer for Every Season by Margaret Roach All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.