ILGB, the gardening book thread

Aside from scads of copies of Mother Earth News, the first gardening book I read was Allen Lacy's Home Ground: A Gardener's Miscellany. It has a wonderful essay about daffodils that I still recall.

I've never been much of a gardener. Where I grew up, we had lawns and we had vegetable gardens and we had fields of corn and soybeans. We had a "woods" too, acres and acres of wild tangled maples, oaks, and hickories along the crick and a branch of Little White Lick. We didn't have houseplants really, though I grew a stunted avocado once for science fair. So I never had much exposure to gardens as I think of them now - oases of color and light and shade, places of beauty and contemplative work. I started to gain an appreciation when I moved to Seattle, where things grow willingly and people carefully develop small urban spaces into loveliness. A few years ago, I read Katherine White's collection of seed catalogue reviews (can't recall the title and am having no luck finding it at the moment), and I was hooked. We were living in a house nestled in a green belt, with a long neglected but interesting yard where forgotten perennials would appear at random. We were only there for 18 months before abandoning it for a downtown apartment, but I learned and pruned and planted and composted and reveled in the beauty of the things I could grow. And, started reading and collecting gardening books.

The main one I use for research and wishlisting is the Sunset Western Garden Book, but there's also Perennials for Washington and Oregon. For reading, Katherine White (of the New Yorker) - her collection of seed catalogue reviews and her letters to Elizabeth Lawrence, Elizabeth Lawrence's A Garden of One's Own and A Southern Garden, some collections of Gertrude Jekyll, and all of the gardening series from Common Reader.

The place we live now is challenging w/r/t making a garden, mostly because we don't expect to stay here. The soil is good, generally, but the climate harsh. The steppes of eastern Washington - broiling hot summers, severely cold winters, high winds, little rain. I'm more inspired to stay indoors most days, imagining a move back to Seattle.

You need a climate-controlled dome over your house!
There's a great seed-catalog review chapter in the Pollan book.

One year rabbits decimated my annual seedlings the first night after I planted them out. In a rage I consulted my books, only to find this entry in the Wise Garden Encyclopedia (first pub.1936—I have a '51 and a '59 edition. Sick.):

"Another eater of green vegetation who may possibly visit or take up residence in the garden is the cottontail rabbit, of which varieties are found throughout the U.S. Here is another case of the gardener's choice: Is the company of this timid and beautiful little creature worth his board in bark, grass, foliage and vegetables? He has nothing in his favor except attractive appearance and engaging manner unless it is the fact that he is nobody's enemy. He is not an insect eater, not does he prey on foes of insect pests."

There is also, under "Mulching" a picture of a shrub swaddled in fiberglass batting, captioned "GLASS WOOL, A NEW KIND OF MULCHING MATERIAL."

AND there's an entry on "Men's Garden Clubs!!!!"

Another rainy day. Maybe I'll go to the used book store!

I just have practical ones: a gardening year thing and a plant directory, both produced by the RHS. My garden is so tiny I don't even need them, really. The National Trust is often a good source of old-fashioned gardening books, or books about old-gardening anyway.

"Flowers are of course a sexual display unmatched in the living world and anybody who does not respond a little probably has no blood in him. But they aren't everything, or even the most important thing, at least not for the gardener.
Life, as they say, is even bigger than sex and has occasional moments of interest apart from sex, and that is true of plants as of primates. In the garden there is always life, right through the year, and gardeners are merely those people who, while admiring the sex of plants as much as or more than anybody else, go on even beyond, and admire as well the bones and skin and guts and all the rest of it in all seasons. Compared to gardeners, I think it is generally agreed that others understand very little about anything of consequence.”

Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman

While not strictly a gardening book, I read an interesting book called The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan that I think almost any gardener would enjoy. Essentially, it places gardening into the biological framework of symbiosis between particular plants and humans, which POV sheds some very interesting sidelight on the whole subject and makes certain 'buried' facts appear in high relief.

Anyone else read this?

I have it on my pile. I loved his book "Second Nature," but couldn't get into the one he wrote about building his studio. His manifesto at the end of Second Nature is so right-on—the idea that ALL public space should be considered garden, and that the entire profession of landscape architecture has been sidetracked by catering to wealthy homeowners when public space should have been their bailiwick. While they were working in the private realm, highways were laid down along city riverfronts, etc.
Welcome back, Aimless! How was your walk?

I saw some spectacular country, killed me a kilo of mosquitos, and met some magnificent trees. A good walk all the way around.