BiblioVault - Books about Garden Types

Chicago Gardens

The Early History

Cathy Jean Maloney

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Once maligned as a swampy outpost, the fledgling city of Chicago brazenly adopted the motto Urbs in Horto or City in a Garden, in 1837. Chicago Gardens shows how this upstart town earned its sobriquet over the next century, from the first vegetable plots at Fort Dearborn to innovative garden designs at the 1933 World’s Fair.
            Cathy Jean Maloney has spent decades researching the city’s horticultural heritage, and here she reveals the unusual history of Chicago’s first gardens. Challenged by the region’s clay soil, harsh winters, and fierce winds, Chicago’s pioneering horticulturalists, Maloney demonstrates, found imaginative uses for hardy prairie plants. This same creative spirit thrived in the city’s local fruit and vegetable markets, encouraging the growth of what would become the nation’s produce hub. The vast plains that surrounded Chicago, meanwhile, inspired early landscape architects, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen, and O.C. Simonds, to new heights of grandeur.
            Maloney does not forget the backyard gardeners: immigrants who cultivated treasured seeds and pioneers who planted native wildflowers. Maloney’s vibrant depictions of Chicagoans like “Bouquet Mary,” a flower peddler who built a greenhouse empire, add charming anecdotal evidence to her argument–that Chicago’s garden history rivals that of New York or London and ensures its status as a world-class capital of horticultural innovation.
            With exquisite archival photographs, prints, and postcards, as well as field guide descriptions of living legacy gardens for today’s visitors, Chicago Gardens will delight green-thumbs from all parts of the world.

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Growing Gardens, Building Power

Food Justice and Urban Agriculture in Brooklyn

Justin Sean Myers

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Across the United States marginalized communities are organizing to address social, economic, and environmental inequities through building community food systems rooted in the principles of social justice. But how exactly are communities doing this work, why are residents tackling these issues through food, what are their successes, and what barriers are they encountering? This book dives into the heart of the food justice movement through an exploration of East New York Farms! (ENYF!), one of the oldest food justice organizations in Brooklyn, and one that emerged from a bottom-up asset-oriented development model. It details the food inequities the community faces and what produced them, how and why residents mobilized to turn vacant land into community gardens, and the struggles the organization has encountered as they worked to feed residents through urban farms and farmers markets. This book also discusses how through the politics of food justice, ENYF! has challenged the growth-oriented development politics of City Hall, opposed the neoliberalization of food politics, navigated the funding constraints of philanthropy and the welfare state, and opposed the entrance of a Walmart into their community. Through telling this story, Growing Gardens, Building Power offers insights into how the food justice movement is challenging the major structures and institutions that seek to curtail the transformative power of the food justice movement and its efforts to build a more just and sustainable world.

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Integrated Landscaping

Following Nature’s Lead

Lauren Chase-Rowell

University of New Hampshire Press, 2012

Most landscape manuals describe a linear sequence of processes: design, plant selection, installation, and ongoing maintenance. Integrated Landscaping is different. It uses natural ecosystems as models, taking a nonlinear, holistic approach that addresses these processes simultaneously. Integrated Landscaping treats each site as a system of plant and animal communities, considering their interrelationships with each other and their environment.

Integrated Landscaping: Following Nature's Lead is a valuable resource for anyone concerned with helping to shape the landscape we all share. When we see ourselves as part of the whole, we can see that what we do in places where we live, work, and play has a ripple effect far beyond the space each of us calls home.

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My City Highrise Garden

Kleit,Micah

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Gardening on rooftops, balconies, and terraces is a popular trend. After thirty-five years of experience, Susan Brownmiller writes with honesty and humor about her oasis twenty floors above a Manhattan street.

She reports the catastrophes: losing daytime access during building-wide renovations; assaults from a mockingbird during his mating season. And the joys: a peach tree fruited for fifteen years; the windswept birches lasted for twenty-five. Butterflies and bees pay annual visits. She pampers a buddleia, a honeysuckle, roses, hydrangeas, and more. Her adventures celebrate the tenacity of nature, inviting readers to marvel at her garden’s resilience, and her own.

Enhanced by over thirty color photographs, this passionate account of green life in a gritty, urban environment will appeal to readers and gardeners wherever they dwell.

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Reading Zen in the Rocks

The Japanese Dry Landscape Garden

François Berthier

University of Chicago Press, 2005

The Japanese dry landscape garden has long attracted—and long baffled—viewers from the West. While museums across the United States are replicating these "Zen rock gardens" in their courtyards and miniature versions of the gardens are now office decorations, they remain enigmatic, their philosophical and aesthetic significance obscured. Reading Zen in the Rocks, the classic essay on the karesansui garden by French art historian François Berthier, has now been translated by Graham Parkes, giving English-speaking readers a concise, thorough, and beautifully illustrated history of these gardens.

Berthier's guided tour of the famous garden of Ryoanji (Temple) in Kyoto leads him into an exposition of the genre, focusing on its Chinese antecedents and affiliations with Taoist ideas and Chinese landscape painting. He traces the roles of Shinto and Zen Buddhism in the evolution of the garden and also considers how manual laborers from the lowest classes in Japan had a hand in creating some of its highest examples. Parkes contributes an equally original and substantive essay which delves into the philosophical importance of rocks and their "language of stone," delineating the difference between Chinese and Japanese rock gardens and their relationship to Buddhism. Together, the two essays compose one of the most comprehensive and elegantly written studies of this haunting garden form.

Reading Zen in the Rocks is fully illustrated with photographs of all the major gardens discussed, making it a handsome addition to the library of anyone interested in gardening, Eastern philosophy, and the combination of the two that the karesansui so superbly represents.

Praise for the French edition:

"A small book of rare depth, remarkably illustrated, on one of the most celebrated and beautiful rock gardens of the monasteries of Kyoto."—L'Humanité

"Through Le Jardin de Ryoanji, Berthier teaches us to read the zen in the rocks, to discover the language offered by the garden at Ryoanji. Enigmatic, poetic, and disconcerting, an enriching journey through a work of art of surprising modernity, Le Jardin de Ryoanji is a work that will interest all the amateurs of Japanese art and Eastern philosophy."—Lien Horticole

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Sharing the Love of Gardening

The History of The Westport Garden Club

Kristie C. Wolferman

University of Missouri Press, 2025

Sharing the Love of Gardening chronicles the seventy-five-year history of Kansas City’s Westport Garden Club (WGC). Founded as a women’s garden club in 1950, the group became a member of the prestigious Garden Club of America (GCA) in 1956. Since that time, it has evolved into an organization committed to civic improvement through educational programs and action in the areas of conservation, horticulture and the use of native plants.

With the post-World War II housing boom, the nascent WGC became involved in landscaping projects aimed at beautifying Kansas City. These efforts continued when the WGC led re-landscaping efforts after the Great Flood of 1951. Early in their club’s history, the women of the WGC learned that collaboration with other organizations allowed them to have a greater impact on the causes about which they cared. They soon began working with city governments and park departments on both sides of the Missouri-Kansas state line, including with the Linda Hall Library and Arboretum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Loose Park Garden Center.

In addition to being a thorough history of The Westport Garden Club—and the considerable influence that a small number of dedicated, educated women have had on it—Sharing the Love of Gardening is a book of stunning photography, showcasing previously unpublished images from the clubs’ archives and the original work of club member and professional photographer Marianne Kilroy.

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