Zanthan Gardens
Category: Garden Book Reviews

I’ll take up the challenge thrown down by Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening via Chan at Bookish Gardener.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.

Angel trumpets is a common name applied to plants both in the genus Brugmansia and the genus Datura. Although they have been recognized as different types of plants for over 100 years, and officially recognized as two separate genuses since 1973, the confusion continues.
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Just as I’m beginning to take garden planning more seriously, just as I’m installing more hardscaping and thinking about garden bones, just as I go in search of a shrubbery, I pick up this little book which says, more or less, “Forget design. It’s about the flowers.”

This book is not so much about gardening as it is about the game of lists. If your garden was a blank slate, if you could plant anything you wanted to grow (but only if you grew it from seed), what would you plant?

I’m not sure I can even come up with a 100 plants to grow from seed at this point in my gardening career. I’m not very good at raising things from seed. But, I’ll have a go at making a list of my own. Why don’t you add a comment and tell me what you would grow.
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The first section of The Southern Heirloom Garden is a historical overview of the various cultural influences on Southern gardens. The second section contains plant profiles of “the most commonly cultivated plants in early Southern gardens.” Together they are directed at those gardeners who need to preserve or restore the heirloom gardens of the South. But the information just as is useful for the rest of us.
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Elizabeth Berry grows beans on her ranch 85 miles outside of Santa Fe. More specifically, she grows beans for Mark Miller’s Coyote Cafe restaurant. She specializes in unusual and heirloom beans.

Her Great Bean Book book is actually a cookbook. However, in addition to providing a recipe for each type of bean included, there is a detailed description of each. This makes the book a handy reference when perusing seed catalogs, or when shopping at Central Market. Central Market carries a large variety of beans in its bulk food section. And beans are, after all, seeds. I planted a dozen soybeans that I grew from beans we scattered during Setsubun. Buying beans to plant from Central Market is cheaper than buying them from a specialty seed catalog.
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