I’ll take up the challenge thrown down by Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening via Chan at Bookish Gardener.
- Total Number of Gardening Books I Own:I count 96 that I can get to right now and probably another 20 or 30 in the back room that I can’t get to because of our kitchen deconstruction project.
- Name five of your favorite gardening books:
- Passalong Plants.
- Collected essays by Henry Mitchell. Essential Earthman and On Gardening.
- A Woman’s Hardy Garden. Helena Rutherford Ely. This book and the catalog from Select Seeds helped me fall in love with old-fashioned flowers.
- The Rose Bible. Rayford C. Reddell.
- Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. Michael Pollan.
- What was the last gardening book you bought (or brought home from the library)? Garden Lunacy: A Growing Concern. When I saw it in the library, I thought the title sounded familiar. Then I remembered, Art Wolk asked if he could reprint one of my anecdotes. And yep, he included it in his book along with my name and this website. Cool!
- What was the last gardening book you read? Texas Gardening the Natural Way: The Complete Handbook. Howard Garrett. I found the style to be a bit grating. I prefer his Texas Bug Book.
- List five books that have been particularly meaningful to you:
- The Rodale Herb Book. The very first gardening book I ever bought: 30 years ago.
- Garden Bulbs for the South. Scott Ogden. Started me on my obsession fo. heirloom bulbs for the south like Tulipa clusiana and oxblood lilies.
- Roses in the Southern Garden. G. Michael Shoup. Started me on my obsession for heirloom roses for the south.
- A Southern Garden and Gardens in Winter. Elizabeth Lawrence.
- We Made a Garden. Margery Fish.
- Name three gardening books you’ve been dying to read but just haven’t gotten around to it: These are books I own that I’ve never gotten around to reading.
- Anatomy of a Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers. Sharman Apt Russell.
- A Gardener Obsessed. Geoffrey B Charlesworth.
- What gardening books would you most want to have on hand when shut up in the house by a blizzard? Kathy added this. My initial response was, “Blizzard? What’s a blizzard. These are all books that get me in the mood.
- The Gardener’s Year. Karel Capek.
- Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden.
- For Love of a Rose.
- Tottering in My Garden.
- Thomas Jefferson: The Garden and Farm Books.
- Tasha Tudor’s Garden. Tovah Martin. Made me fall in love with the idea of gardening.
