Here are the vibrant stories of eighteen heroes of horticulture "€" institution builders, plant explorers and garden creators "€" who have all had a major impact on the American landscape. Three of them worked together to establish The Garden Conservancy to preserve exceptional gardens for the public. Others came to the rescue to restore and enhance public parks and public spaces, setting new standards for aesthetics and encouraging wider public use. While some have taken on the revitalization of botanic gardens, important to science and public education as well as public enjoyment, others have worked to create new outstanding public gardens. Then there are the adventurous tales of the intrepid plant explorers who travel to remote parts of the globe hunting for new plants unknown in the west. Many have also worked to hybridize and improve the plants already in use and most have opened nurseries to help insure these great plants are available to the public. Finally, two have created their own exceptional gardens that, thanks to existence of The Garden Conservancy, are becoming new public institutions.

This is an insightful and enlightening look at the life and works of the internationally renowned English garden designer. Rosemary Verey was the last of the great English garden legends. Although she embraced gardening late in life, she quickly achieved international renown. She was the acknowledged apostle of the "English style," the "must have" adviser to the rich and famous - including Prince Charles and Elton John - and a wildly popular lecturer. She was a natural teacher who encouraged her fans to believe that they were fully capable of creating beautiful gardens while validating their quest for a native vernacular, She also re-introduced the English to their own gardening traditions. A demanding taskmaster and a relentless perfectionist, Rosemary Verey, in her life as in her work, was the very personification of the English garden style.

You may never look at a garden in the same way again. Though not a “how-to” book, Beauty By Design is a treasure trove of ideas and enchantment for seasoned gardeners and beginners alike. Eleven inspired artists of the garden share their stories, their secrets, and their passion for gardening. Landscape is the canvas. Foliage, flowers, rocks, water, and other bounties of nature are the materials. With plants, objects, art, and artifice, they create magical spaces, engage our senses, and summon forth pure delight. Travel with Bill Terry and Rosemary Bates to these special places on the Pacific Northwest coast. Visit Dan Hinkley’s enchanted garden, perched above the shore of Puget Sound in Washington State. Close by, beauty explodes in an earthly paradise created by sculptors George and David Lewis and in Linda Cochran’s stunning garden of exotics. Cross the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island and potter Robin Hopper’s “Anglojapanadian” woodland wonderland. Enjoy the subtle blending of texture and colour in painter Eva Diener’s Sunshine Coast botanical garden. Admire the genius of Robert and Birgit Bateman’s inspiring space on Salt Spring Island, Des and Sandy Kennedy’s fairy-tale forest house and garden on Denman Island, and Kathy Leishman’s garden of refinement for all seasons on Bowen Island. In downtown Vancouver, Glen Patterson indulges his passion for alpines and conifers in his astonishing third-storey roof garden. Elsewhere in the city, Pam Frost’s eye for colour and arrangement transports the viewer out of the urban into the sublime, while on the Saanich Peninsula, writers Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane speak with love and eloquence of their garden, and in verse, too. Accompanied by breathtaking photographs, these gardeners and their stories will inspire all who love to paint with plants.

Booklist Editors’ Choice “Best Books of 2019” An intimate portrait of the joys and hardships of rural life, as one man searches for community, equality, and tradition in Appalachia Charles D. Thompson, Jr. was born in southwestern Virginia into an extended family of small farmers. Yet as he came of age he witnessed the demise of every farm in his family. Over the course of his own life of farming, rural education, organizing, and activism, the stories of his home place have been his constant inspiration, helping him identify with the losses of others and to fight against injustices. In Going Over Home, Thompson shares revelations and reflections, from cattle auctions with his grandfather to community gardens in the coal camps of eastern Kentucky, racial disparities of white and Black landownership in the South to recent work with migrant farm workers from Latin America. In this heartfelt first-person narrative, Thompson unpacks our country’s agricultural myths and addresses the history of racism and wealth inequality and how they have come to bear on our nation’s rural places and their people.

New England has a rich gardening heritage. In The Garden Tourist's New England, garden designer Jana Milbocker takes you on a fantastic tour of 140 gardens and nurseries and provides all the information you need to make the most of your visit. From the breathtaking flower gardens of Mount Desert Island in Maine, to Colonial Revival gardens in Connecticut and New Hampshire, topiary gardens in Rhode Island, and botanical gardens in Vermont and Massachusetts, there is something for every gardener to enjoy in a tour of the region. A companion to the Northeast edition of The Garden Tourist, this guide features notable private gardens, specialty nurseries, and off-the-beaten-path destinations for the passionate gardener.?Preview 140 outstanding gardens including 34 specialty nurseries in 264 pages richly illustrated with 700 photos.?Enjoy the best botanical, historic, and private gardens in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.?Plan your trips with regional maps, contact information, sample itineraries, and garden amenities.

One of our finest writers on one of her greatest loves. Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced friends, she planted only seeds of the flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book) she gathers all she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination. Kincaid's affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer but cannot bring herself to love winter, for it hides the garden. She adores the rhododendron Jane Grant, and appreciates ordinary Blue Lake string beans, but abhors the Asiatic lily. The sources of her inspiration -- seed catalogues, the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, gardens like Monet's at Giverny -- are subjected to intense scrutiny. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up. My Garden (Book) is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the persons who tend them.

A fascinating study of the great Victorian and Edwardian head gardeners, a remarkable group of self-made men who transformed gardening from menial labour into a profession.

In a time of uncertainty about our environmental future—an eye-opening global tour of some of the most wounded places on earth, and stories of how a passionate group of eco-restorers is leading the way to their revitalization. Award-winning science journalist Judith D. Schwartz takes us first to China’s Loess Plateau, where a landmark project has successfully restored a blighted region the size of Belgium, lifting millions of people out of poverty. She journeys on to Norway, where a young indigenous reindeer herder challenges the most powerful orthodoxies of conservation—and his own government. And in the Middle East, she follows the visionary work of an ambitious young American as he attempts to re-engineer the desert ecosystem, using plants as his most sophisticated technology. Schwartz explores regenerative solutions across a range of landscapes: deserts, grasslands, tropics, tundra, Mediterranean. She also highlights various human landscapes, the legacy of colonialism and industrial agriculture, and the endurance of indigenous knowledge. The Reindeer Chronicles demonstrates how solutions to seemingly intractable problems can come from the unlikeliest of places, and how the restoration of local water, carbon, nutrient, and energy cycles can play a dramatic role in stabilizing the global climate. Ultimately, it reveals how much is in our hands if we can find a way to work together and follow nature’s lead.

This paperback edition includes two new head gardeners, Fiona Dennis of Charleston Farmhouse, East Sussex and Stephen Griffith of Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens, Dorset, as well as updates on all the gardeners featured in the hardback edition: Ned Price, Fergus Garrett, Paul Pulford, Mick Evans, Beatrice Krehl, Troy Scott Smith, Lucille Savin, Alistair Clark, Carol Sales, Andrew Woodall, Michael Walker, Martin Ogle, Jim Buckland and Sarah Wain.

The Armchair Book of Gardens is a collection of indiviual essays focused on understanding gardens in a different light/perspective. The book concentrates on the emotional, social, spiritual, and politicial aspects of the garden.