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American
Horticultural Society
The American Gardener
March/April 2007 Recommended
Garden Books
Because the AHS Horticultural Book
Service was discontinued as of June 30, 2000 no further phone or mail orders
are filled. However, AHS members are still be able to order books at a
discount by linking to Amazon.com through the Society's Web site. Through this
partnership with Amazon.com, AHS members can receive better discounts on most
titles, faster delivery, greater inventory, and improved access to
hard-to-find books. The books listed here have not been critically evaluated;
they have been chosen for description based on unusual subject matter or
substantive content.
The following books are our current
recommended garden books from the March/April 2007 issue of
The American Gardener. To read the review just click on the
book title. You can then order the book directly from Amazon.com by clicking
on "Buy this book!" that follows each review.
BOOK REVIEWS
Recommendations for Your Gardening Library
GARDENER’S BOOKS
Confessions of the Plant-Obsessed
BOOK REVIEWS
Recommendations for Your Gardening Library
 Flower
Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of
Flowers Amy Stewart. Algonquin Books. Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
2007. 306 pages. Publisher’s price, hardcover: $23.95.
Buy This Book
In this fascinating account of the cut flower industry, Amy Stewart
takes a behind-the-scenes look at how flowers around the world are
engineered, mass produced, and shipped far and wide, all to satisfy
consumers’ year-round demand for long-lasting, inexpensive - not to
mention perfect - flowers.
Author of The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements
of Earthworms (2004), Stewart brings her infectious curiosity to bear on
the ins and outs of this $40 billion global industry. She takes the
reader on a journey from the wholesale flower market in San Francisco to
the high-tech flower auction in the Netherlands - “Imagine Wall Street
in the Garden of Eden,” writes Stewart. The story of the passionate
breeder who created the famous ‘Star Gazer’ lily the old-fashioned way
stands in stark contrast to that of the scientist trying to genetically
engineer a blue rose. This becomes a recurring theme—old traditions
giving way to new.
Throughout the book, Stewart tries to reconcile the
inherent contradiction between the business perception of flowers as
just another commodity and the common perception of flowers as something
delicate, sentimental, and unspoiled. Indeed, while the flower business
has become highly efficient, it’s not always pretty. In the Netherlands,
Stewart visits a greenhouse full of machine-fed roses growing in
“surprisingly small containers—their roots confined to plastic wrapped
rock wool cubes that were only about three inches high.” At a large
flower grower in California, she walks into a giant cooler filled with
thousands of newly planted tulip bulbs sitting in black plastic crates
waiting to be moved into greenhouses. “The place had the air of a
morgue: chilled, clinical, and impersonal.”
But Stewart also points out the bright spots; the rise of
organic growers and “green label” certification programs in Europe and
soon here in the United States, as well as increased awareness among
consumers, could change the landscape in the coming years. And although
Stewart’s experiences have made her look at flowers a little
differently, for her, they have not lost their magic.
Alexandra Goho
Alexandra Goho is a freelance science and technology writer based in
Seattle, Washington.
 Garden
Bulbs for the South Scott Ogden. Timber Press, Portland, Oregon,
2007. 396 pages. Publisher’s price, hardcover: $34.95.
Buy This Book
This new edition of Scott Ogden’s 1994 book on the bulbous (in its
widest sense) plants suitable for the southern United States now appears
in an updated and much expanded edition. Like the first edition, it is
an essential gardening book—but not only for the South. Ogden presents a
broad palette for those gardening in favored locales on the Pacific
Coast as well as for those following the current trend of growing
tropical bedding plants in much colder climes. And where many authors
merely repeat what has already been written, Ogden’s closely observed
peculiarities of his subjects make it outstanding horticultural
literature.
As in the prior edition, Ogden emphasizes daffodils
outside the usual sections of trumpets and large- and small-cupped
types. He explicates the deliciously scented paperwhites and their ilk
as well as the heavenly perfumed jonquil, both of whose groups abound in
sturdy heirloom cultivars. He also includes newer clones that he has
found reliable and likely to persist over many seasons.
Again, rain lilies (Zephyranthes, Cooperia, et al.), with
their often recurrent flushes of smaller amaryllislike flowers, receive
thorough treatment. The chapter on crinums and spiderlilies is likewise
full of treasures with fascinating discussions about their histories and
origins. The meaty chapter on cannas, gingers, and aroids offers many
savory choices for the curious and discriminating gardener. And this
constitutes only a tithe of the varied bulbs that Ogden describes and
recommends.
The profuse color photographs are clear and apropos.
Those displaying garden groups illustrate how suitable companions can
transform a humdrum border into a thing of beauty. Even the florist
amaryllis, which some consider to be merely big blobs of color, are used
as attractive groups in mixed borders. For the most part the book’s
nomenclature and plant identification are very accurate; however, I
noticed that the iris twice captioned as Iris pallida ‘Dalmatica’ is
actually the tough and floriferous ‘Violacea Grandiflora’ of 1856
vintage.
This book makes one long for a warmer climate though not
one caused by global warming.
Jerry Flintoff
Jerry Flintoff has been a plant addict since the age of six. He has the
good fortune to garden on Vashon Island, Washington.
 Rodale’s
Vegetable Garden Problem Solver Fern Marshall Bradley. Rodale,
Emmaus, Pennsylvania, 2007. 472 pages. Publisher’s price, softcover:
$19.95.
Buy This Book
For all those who cultivate a vegetable patch—or aspire to start
one—this book will be a welcome addition to your library. The detailed
table of contents allows the reader to locate information fast and
effectively. The introduction sets a solid foundation for why organic
methods work: The healthier the soil, the healthier the plants. Healthy
plants are better at withstanding diseases and pests. The bulk of the
book contains alphabetically organized entries ranging from Alternaria
blight to wireworms.
Along with entries for pests, diseases, and gardening
techniques, the book includes entries for more than 60 vegetables with
basic growing instructions, secrets for success, problem prevention, and
troubleshooting. Where appropriate, there are helpful regional tips. For
example, carrots left in the ground on the West Coast may be a source of
virus problems in years to come. And in the East and the Heartland,
squash plants are experiencing new types of yellow vine disease carried
by squash bugs.
Each of the insect pests and diseases listed are
described in detail with suggestions for how to combat them and handy
“control calendars” that are valuable for timing crops to miss the life
cycles of various pests. Techniques such as crop rotation, cover crops,
and companion planting also are clearly and concisely described. I
especially appreciated the “Beyond the Basics” sidebars scattered
throughout the text offering more in-depth discussions on various
topics, such as soil solarization and how to control nematodes with
cover crops.
The book’s green-toned drawings of fencing, trellises,
plants, roots, and pests are simple and easy to follow. I found myself
diagnosing insect damage that I have seen in my own garden based on the
clear illustrations of leaves! There is an illustrated key to insects in
the back of the book, along with the page number for each insect, where
detailed information awaits. The larva and nymph drawings are
particularly instructive. My only complaints are that the Recommended
Reading section was a little light and that Seed Savers Exchange in
Decorah, Iowa, was not mentioned in the Resources for Gardeners section.
I know that I will use this book to keep me a step ahead
of trouble in the garden this year. One tip I’m anxious to try is using
an empty milk carton with the bottom cut out to blanch celery two weeks
prior to harvest. I might also try the book’s time-saving suggestion of
following peas with tomatoes to get double duty out of my trellises.
Keith Crotz
Keith Crotz owns American Botanist booksellers and grows organic
vegetables on the family Centennial Farm in Chillicothe, Illinois.
GARDENER'S BOOKS
Confessions of the Plant-Obsessed
Gardening has often been likened to a drug or even a disease because, as
every plantaholic and garden geek knows, once you’re hooked or stricken,
your feverish desire to pay homage at Flora’s altar will know no bounds.
Several recently published books delve into this phenomenon, exposing a
world rife with people willing to literally go to the ends of the earth
or spend their grocery money to feed their all-consuming horticultural
passions.
 For
James Dodson, a journalist and author from the golf world, his gardening
disease developed latently for many years, until he began building his
own garden in Maine (which he playfully refers to as his “Sissinghurst
of the North”). Realizing he has been firmly bitten by the gardening
bug, he embarks on a year-long quest to gain “a broader understanding of
a garden’s magical ability to enchant and elevate the human spirit,”
which he chronicles in Beautiful Madness (Plume, 2007, $15).
Buy This Book
From the 175th Philadelphia Flower Show to the South African bush,
Dodson’s journey brings him in contact with a cast of colorful, not to
mention completely plant crazy, characters who astound him again and
again with their generosity, knowledge, and total dedication to all
things green.
 “For
me, the feeling that I am making something, or changing something, in my
garden is an addiction,” writes James Raimes, an English transplant who
also began gardening later in life when he purchased a several-acre
property in the New York countryside. In Gardening at Ginger
(Houghton Mifflin, 2007, $23)
Buy This Book,
he confesses his “seven-year obsession with designing and planting a
personal landscape.” Despite a trip to the emergency room for a gashed
hand, contracting Lyme disease, unsuccessfully fending off marauding
deer, and other mishaps, nothing can deter Raimes from spending every
spare moment out in his garden because, he observes, “the mind is very
good at forgetting bad things.” Instead, his mind is filled with to-do
lists, plans, and ideas that betray his absolute enthrallment with
gardening, come what may.
 The
siren song of land begging to be cultivated also ensnared William
Alexander, who set about creating a large vegetable garden on an
overgrown, soggy, sloping area of his newly acquired property. The
$64 Tomato (Algonquin, 2006, $22.95)
Buy This Book
tells the humorous tale of how he “nearly lost his
sanity, spent a fortune, and endured an existential crisis in the quest
for the perfect garden.” Alexander battles all sorts of foes:
groundhogs, weeds, weather, deer, and even his neighbors in his effort
to achieve his goal of raising high-quality, fresh vegetables and
developing a small orchard in his own backyard. Even when Alexander
calculates the cost—physical, mental, and financial—he finds it
impossible to kick his habit of homegrown, sun-warmed Brandywine
tomatoes and the other produce he manages to coax from the earth.
 A
single plant type can often inspire worshipful and even slightly
deranged devotion, particularly when competition is involved, as
evidenced by Otherwise Normal People: Inside the Obsessive and Thorny
World of Competitive Rose Gardening (Algonquin, 2007, $22.95)
Buy This Book.
Curious about what makes rose competition participants tick, author
Aurelia Scott discovered that it often starts innocently enough, say
with a neglected rose bush that produces an unexpectedly exquisite
bloom, and ends up as a life-changing compulsion to collect and show
every kind of rose imaginable. Among the stories of the rose maniacs she
encounters, Scott also interweaves intriguing pieces of rose history and
other fascinating bits of trivia.
 Then
there’s Des Kennedy, hailing from British Columbia’s Gulf Islands, who
writes in The Passionate Gardener (Greystone, 2006, $16.95)
Buy This Book
that gardening burst into his life “like a howling
southeaster” 35 years ago. Through a collection of satirical and
sometimes serious essays, he shares the whirlwind adventure he’s been on
ever since. And while he knows there’s no cure for those afflicted with
an insatiable gardening passion, he does offer a few words of hope: “The
first crucial step to recovery involves an open confession of your
plight. In doing so, you discover a wonderful thing: that you are not
alone, that others have suffered through this same debilitating
experience and emerged from it stronger than before.”
Viveka Neveln, Assistant Editor
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