Ann Lovejoy is best known in the Pacific Northwest, where she writes for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She’s also written 18 books, many of them focusing on naturalistic, organic gardening techniques. Organic Garden Design School is clearly the result of years of work and research into the design principles and techniques that make it possible to create a garden that is inspired, creative—and, above all—natural.

Whether you’re starting from scratch in a new garden or tending an established garden, you’ll find something you can use in this practical and beautiful guide. Organic Garden Design School covers everything from water-saving techniques to composting and soil-building suggestions, to the placement of paths, walls, and architectural features. She offers suggestions for combining plants that grow best in close proximity to one another, sharing common soil, sunlight, and water needs.

Her chapter “Creating a Natural Backdrop” is perhaps the clearest explanation yet of how to incorporate a garden with natural surroundings, using the principles of layering, gardening for habitat, and “editing the woods”—managing the transition between a garden and an adjacent wooded area. She treats this subject with integrity and responsibility, offering suggestions for protecting native plants and eliminating invasive weeds.

Lovejoy includes a 30-page workbook at the back of the book designed to guide gardeners through the design process. Instructions creating on site maps, identifying clutter, tracking weather events, and moving from a formal to a naturalistic design are all covered here.

The photographs in this book are a delight. The chapter on “Creating a Natural Garden” contrasts clipped, formal estate gardens with wild, overgrown flower beds. The choice is clear: Choose plants that will thrive in their natural form, or spend hours with a pair of hedge trimmers keeping a manicured garden under control. Throughout the book, images from her own garden and gardens around the world illustrate her design principles and provide inspiration.—Amy Stewart

Amy Stewart is the author of From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden (Algonquin Books, 2001).

Growing Shrubs and Small Trees in Cold Climates. Nancy Rose, Don Selinger, and John Whitman, with a foreword by Edward R. Hasselkus. Contemporary Books, Chicago, Illinois, 2001. 431 pages. Publisher's price, hardcover: $49.95. Buy this Book

Even with the exemplary credentials of this book’s authors and a foreword by Edward Hasselkus, who lends his name only to the very best of efforts, I was skeptical that the gardening world needed yet another reference book to trees and shrubs. After all, we already have “bibles” by Michael Dirr, Harrison Flint, Gary Hightshoe, and Guy Sternberg on our shelves, plus maintenance manuals and species-specific handbooks.

The book world gets a lot slimmer when one wants to understand only the country’s chillier regions, such as my northwest Chicago (USDA Zone 5) garden, and small trees suitable to urban yards. Then I might refer to Bill Boon and Harlen Groe’s Nature’s Heartland or some paperbacks from Midwest universities, but that’s about it. So while I was intrigued by the book title’s emphasis on “cold climates,” I still hesitated, thinking that it was impossible to write a more useful book on trees and shrubs than already exists.

Once I opened the book and began to read, it began to pass my reviewer’s tests with flying colors. The book describes a wide range of woodies from blueberries to tree peonies and over 700 cultivars in easy-to-read charts. It offers maintenance advice that a beginner can understand (“pull by hand any weeds that appear [in the mulch])” but also includes propagation directions that an expert will appreciate (“keep seed in moist peat at room temperature for 90 days”). The authors provide professional insider tips that only professional horticulturalists working in the north understand: To survive in cold climates, redbuds should be grown from northern seed, for example, and should not be exposed to winter winds.

Best of all, the book provides sources for purchasing the plants via mail-order. I’ve always thought that it’s not good enough to simply dangle all those tempting plants in front of us and then not tell us where to indulge our passion for buying them. Bravo to the authors for doing this extra, and much appreciated, research.

I have only two complaints. While there are ample up-close photos of flowers or buds, it would have been helpful to include more photos or even small black-and-white outlines of the entire plant of each genus or cultivar to give us a better clue to the plant’s landscape placement. And I want the whole book laminated, so that I can tote it around in the wheelbarrow without damage.—Rommy Lopat

Rommy Lopat was the publisher and editor of The Weedpatch Gazette, which won the Garden Writers Association of America’s 2001 Quill & Trowel award for best gardening newsletter just after she announced plans to cease publication. Her writing can be now seen at weedpatch.com.

A Year in Our Gardens. Letters by Nancy Goodwin and Allen Lacy. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 2001. 208 pages. Publisher's price, hardcover: $27.50. Buy this Book


Everyone loves to read someone else’s mail. Most of us, governed by conscience, do so only with permission. That’s the appeal of books of compiled letters: they are there to be read.

This book contains a year’s worth of letters between gardeners Nancy Goodwin and Allen Lacy. These letters are real and substantive, not just e-mail chatter. I was initially disturbed to read in the book’s introduction that the letters were written with eventual publication in mind. My dismay struggled to survive the first few pages, and soon died entirely: The letters are genuine.

Nancy Goodwin and her husband, Craufurd, garden in Hillsborough, North Carolina; Allen Lacy and his wife, Hella, garden in Linwood, New Jersey. Both gardens are located in USDA Zone 7—and there, in many ways, the resemblance ends. Differences in soil, degree and duration of summer heat, available water, and so on, illustrate to perfection that the winter hardiness zone ratings are at best a loose guide. Most seasoned gardeners already know this, but it’s satisfying somehow to be able to compare one's own experience with that of others. (My own garden in the warmer half of Zone 4, for instance, is covered each winter with up to 300 inches of snow; comparing notes with Zone 4 gardeners who get little snow cover makes me endlessly grateful for what I have.) Gardeners who suffer from Zone Envy (the Zone is always greener on the other side of the fence) will learn that there’s always something lacking in other people’s gardens.

One sign that these are interesting letters is that I longed to jump into the conversation: Nancy, what’s the recipe for your deer spray? Allen, how do I subscribe to your newsletter? Have either of you tried vacuuming Japanese beetles? (Use a wet/dry canister vacuum with an inch or so of soapy water in the bottom. It works. Nancy and Allen's gardening news, which is accurate but gossipy in tone, is leavened by the inclusion of other topics: the health of the writers; news of family and friends; music; memories. I was left wanting to know what happened next.

This would be an excellent gift book for a gardener recovering from an illness: it’s meaty yet easily absorbed; it's physically light enough to read in bed or bath; it's entertainingly distracting, and can be read in bits and pieces or in one go, and Martha Blake-Adams’s charming line drawings of scenes from both authors’ gardens are additional delights. Indeed, you may wish to buy A Year in Our Gardens yourself and save it for that next summer cold. It's no faint praise to say that this book could stand up to the exigencies of a root-canal.—Nancy McDonald

Nancy McDonald is a free-lance writer who divides her year between Portland, Oregon, and Grand Marais, Michigan.

Editor's Summer Reading Picks

Notes on Madoo: Making a Garden in the Hamptons. 
Robert Dash. Houghton Mifflin CO., Boston, Massachusetts. 2000. Publisher's price, hardcover: $24  Buy this Book

As any gardener knows, creating a garden is a lifetime work in process. The essays in this book, culled from Robert Dash’s biweekly gardening column in the East Hampton Star, represent over 30 years of observation and experience gained in turning a nearly two-acre property on Long Island into a garden he calls Madoo.

A writer, painter, and founding patron of The Garden Conservancy, Dash’s essays recount the growth and evolution of a gardener as well as a garden, from the early days of horticultural excess (“in much the same way that an art student might go berserk in an unattended art store”) to the more mature vision of today. Along the way Dash has had to retrench from the devastation of a garden-destroying hurricane, puzzle over inconsistent plant descriptions in books and catalogs, and face the numerous other trials and triumphs that go along with gardening.

The essays are arranged by season, but you can open the book anywhere and start reading. You don’t need to read too far before you get a taste of Dash’s opinions— and he doesn’t mince words. Here’s his view on forsythias: “It is an absolute ass of a color, a greeny-yaller braying insult to the obscure triumph of chartreuse.”

Even if you don’t agree with all of Dash’s likes and dislikes, it’s clear he has more than a little garden dirt under his fingernails and knows what he’s talking about. If you enjoy reading Henry Mitchell or Elizabeth Lawrence, this book is a good bet for you.—Mary Yee

Chicken Soup for the Gardener's Soul: 101 Stories to Sow Seeds of Love, Hope and Laughter. Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Cynthia Brian, Cindy Buck, Marion Owen, Pat Stone, and Carol Sturgulewski. Health Communications, Inc., Deerfield Beach, Florida, 2000. Publisher's price, softcover: $12.95. Buy this Book

Part of the on-going Chicken Soup series, this anthology will appeal to any gardener who sees lessons for life in the digging of soil and watching seeds sprout and grow. The 101 essays in the book come from well-known writers such as Erma Bombeck, James Michener, and Nelson Mandela, as well as from lots of ordinary folks who share tales of events and memories that all reach the same conclusion: Gardening connects people with the cycle of life.

The stories—arranged in nine thematic chapters, including “Love in Bloom,” “Making a Difference,” and “The Seasons of Life”—are very short, but many pack emotional punches. There’s the story of a middle-aged son and his father, who after being estranged for almost 40 years, meet again and find common ground in talking about their gardens. There’s the wife of 25 years who did not care for gardening and never understood her husband’s love for it until she picked butter beans with him in the last days of his terminal illness.

Many of the stories are tear-jerkers, but there are also light-hearted pieces, a few poems, and humorous cartoons scattered throughout.

For quick reading that can restore your optimism for the goodness of humankind and reaffirm your love for gardening, you won’t miss with Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul.—Mary Yee

My Garden (Book): Jamaica Kinkead. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, New York. 1999. Publisher's price, hardcover: $23. Buy this Book

A native of Antigua who now resides in New England, Kinkead is a novelist and professor at Harvard University. Having grown up in the Caribbean, she brings a fresh perspective to gardening and to life in America, and she is refreshingly outspoken in her opinions. Her stream-of-consciousness style takes a bit of adjusting to, but the essays in this book are a delightful blend of her ruminations on life with descriptions of the plants she grows in her garden and the people who have influenced her.

The book is a series of essays, some of which have been previously published. They range from one detailing her emotional connection with the former owners of the house she now lives in, to a discussion of the joys of reading seed catalogs, and a description of her travails on a plant hunting expedition to China with a group of botanists and nursery owners. The essays also include Kincaid’s musings on such topics as colonialism, the winter garden, Monet’s garden, and the Chelsea Flower Show.

Be prepared for the dropping of many names, both plants and people. The book is perfectly readable without the services of a plant encyclopedia, but more than once I felt the urge to consult one after coming across an evocative plant description. Not everyone will share Kincaid’s opinions, but it’s hard not to admire her passion for gardening and her stylish writing.—David J. Ellis

Gardener's Books


There are many more new books on the market than we have time or space to review, but here are a few that recently caught our eye. Through a partnership with amazon.com, AHS members can order these and other books at a discount by linking to amazon.com through Society's Web site at www.ahs.org.

Taylor's Guide to Trees. Susan A. Roth. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, Massachusetts, 2001. 408 pages. Publisher's price, softcover: $23. Buy this Book

This latest title in the revised series of Taylor’s Guides includes color photographs of over 300 species of trees and shrubs together with brief decriptions. The encyclopedia offers more detailed information on each species, its care, and related species.

National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers: Eastern Region.  John W. Thieret. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, New York, 2001. 864 pages. Publisher's price, softcover: $19.95.
Buy this Book

National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers: Western Region.  John W. Thieret. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, New York, 2001. 864 pages. Publisher's price, softcover: $19.95.
Buy this Book

The first part of these two completely revised titles from the venerable field guide series each contains over 900 all-new color photographs arranged by flower color and shape. The remainder of each book consists of descriptive information about each plant, including its range. Includes a glossary and index.

The Spirit of the Garden.  Martha Brookes Hutcheson.  University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2001. 221 pages. Publisher's price, hardcover: $34.95. Buy this Book


Part of the Library of American Landscape Architects’ Centennial Reprint Series, this book was first published in 1923 and was widely praised for its insightful coverage of garden design principles. Many of the photographs were taken by the author, including many “before and after” subjects. These and the lively text offer the reader a special perspective on gardening and history. The introduction to this edition by Rebecca Warren Davidson, offers insight into the life and times of the author.

Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's and Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving, 2nd edition. Carol Deppe. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont, 2000. 367 pages. Publisher's price, softcover: $27.95. Buy this Book


In this revised and expanded edition of her book first published in 1993, Deppe presents basic techniques of plant breeding in a manner that is both interesting and easy to understand. Following the methods described, anyone can breed new vegetable varieties, and reap satisfying rewards. Deppe explains how to breed for various traits, maintain varieties, and conduct variety trials. Added to this new edition of the book are six chapters on seed saving and two chapters on sustainable gardening practices.

Weedless Gardening.  Lee Reich. Workman Publishing, New York, New York, 2001. 200 pages. Publisher's price, softcover: $8.95. Buy this Book


This book, Reich details what he calls a new system of gardening—the Weedless Garden—that reduces needless labor, produces the least disturbance to the natural environment, and still yields good gardening results. Reich covers all the basics of soil testing, preparing a site, planting, watering, mulching, and composting. Includes information on growing vegetables, designing and maintaining flower gardens, and planting and caring for trees, shrubs, ground covers, and vines as well as a bibliography for further reading.