Eco-gardening is at its best in TheMondayGarden.com
THE ESSENTIAL GARDENING BOOKS
picture: from my book shelf
MY FAVORITE PLANT REFERENCE GUIDES
| The House Plant Expert is my number one choice for indoor gardening beginners (and everyone else). It's also one of the world's best selling houseplant guides so I guess a lot of other people like it too | The second volume of The House Plant Expert doesn’t' disappoint; it is particularly useful for plants which have been recently introduced or which have become more popular in recent years | Herb Gustafson has written several wonderful bonsai books that are good for beginners and then read again by the more advanced; this particular book is a good place to start as it will help you keep your first bonsai in good shape. | This is the one orchid book that I have heard professionals consistently recommend. |
| If I could have only one tree care book, Lee Reich's The Pruning Book would be my first pick | This "Weeds" book is the best single reference I can find to help pin down plants I find in the alleys, backyards, and other places where the soil has been distributed. The book has the extra benefits of helping me understand weeds from the farmers' perspective. | Eric Grissell's Insects and Gardens changed my thinking on gardening more than any other single book I've read. See my article "Mulch in Place" which reviews part of this book. If you're a gardener that cares about the environment, read this book | This books is the top of my "if I can only have one.." list for perennial gardening. |
| I do most of my plant research on the web but to make sure I'm looking up the right plant, I use these two books by Symonds almost daily to confirm the identification of native and naturalized woody plants | ||
| If you are taking the Master Gardener program or another horticultural program that requires a knowledge of botany, this book turns the botany jargon into something understandable and actually interesting. It's also good any time if you want to know the mechanics of being a plant | If you love house plants, you need at least one book by Tovah Martin; this one is my favorite. | There are many books out there abut container gardening. I learned a lot from this one and keep it for pictures. | Just about everyone in my Master Gardener group keeps a copy this book handy |
INSPIRATIONAL STORIES
| At least a couple of times a week, I think about things I learned from Joan Dye Gussow’s engrossing autobiography about one woman’s struggle to become a self-sustaining localist in New York’s gentrified Hudson River Valley | This is the delightful, easy-to-read account of how Michael Ableman saved and enriched a small organic farm being slowly engulfed by suburbia. I find this book particularly inspirational because the author had to "learn on the job" and made lots of sometimes-costly mistakes but he persisted and succeeded. | The author is a founder of the organic pioneer company, Seeds of Change. This is fascinating case study on how a handful of people brought about enormous social change via the private sector. |
| If you’re not fully familiar with how USA and European government subsidies for the giant agri-business, together with the World Bank and IMF, have devastated the farm economies in developing countries, driving hundreds of thousands from the countryside into urban poverty and economically-forced emigration (e.g. into your backyard), you owe it to yourself to see this DVD, narrated by Jamaica Kinkaid, and then pass it along to your neighbors. This is the flip side of why we need to support small, organic farms. | If you want a book about a dream garden, with stunningly beautiful pictures, to curl up with on a cold, rainy day, this is it. |