BiblioVault - Books about Gardening

Technology and the Garden

Michael G. Lee

Harvard University Press

Technology is the practice and activity of making, as well as the tools that enable that making. It is also the realm of ideas behind those endeavors, the expanse of technical knowledge and expertise. At once material, intellectual, active, and social, technology is the purposeful organization of human effort to alter and shape the environment. Gardens, like other designed landscapes, are products of a range of technologies; their layout, construction, and maintenance would be unthinkable without technology. What are the technologies of garden making, what are the concepts and ideas behind garden technologies, and what is the meaning and experience of those endeavors?

Technology and the Garden examines the shaping and visualization of the landscape; the development of horticultural technologies; the construction of landscape through hydraulics, labor, and infrastructure; and the effect of emerging technologies on the experience of landscape. These essays demonstrate how the techniques of the garden can be hidden or revealed, disguised beneath the earth or celebrated on the surface. How designers have approached technology, in all historical periods and in a diversity of places and cultures, is a central question in landscape studies.

[more]

Texas Gardening the Natural Way

The Complete Handbook

By Howard Garrett

University of Texas Press, 2004

Compost your old "complete" gardening guide. There's a new way of gardening in Texas that's healthier for people and the environment, more effective at growing vigorous plants and reducing pests, cheaper to maintain, and just more fun. It's Howard Garrett's "The Natural Way" organic gardening program, and it's all here in Texas Gardening the Natural Way.

This book is the first complete, state-of-the-art organic gardening handbook for Texas. Using Howard Garrett's new mainstream gardening techniques, Texas Gardening the Natural Way presents a total gardening program:

How to plan, plant, and maintain beautiful landscapes without using chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides.
Gardening fundamentals: soils, landscape design, planting techniques, and maintenance practices.
Includes more native and adaptable varieties of garden and landscape plants than any other guide on the market.
Trees: 134 species of evergreens, berry- and fruit-bearing, flowering, yellow fall color, orange fall color, and red fall color.
Shrubs and specialty plants: 85 species for sun, shade, spring flowering, summer flowering, and treeform shrubs.
Ground covers and vines: 51 species for sun and shade.
Annuals and perennials: 136 species for fall color, winter color, summer color in shade and sun, and spring color. Also seeding rates for wildflowers.
Lawn grasses: 10 species for sun and shade, with additional information on 16 native grasses, seeding rates for 32 grasses, and suggested mowing heights.
Fruits, nuts, and vegetables: 58 species, with a vegetable planting chart and information on organic pecan and fruit tree growing, fruit varieties for Texas, grape and pecan varieties, and gardening by the moon.
Common green manure crops: 29 crops that help enrich the soil.
Herbs: 66 species for culinary and medicinal uses.
Bugs: 73 types of helpful and harmful bugs, with organic remedies for pests, lists of beneficial bugs and plants that attract them, a beneficial bug release schedule, and sources for beneficial bugs.
Plant diseases: organic treatments for 55 common problems.
Organic methods for repelling mice, rabbits, armadillos, beavers, cats, squirrels, and deer.
Organic management practices: watering, fertilizing, controlling weeds, releasing beneficial insects, biological controls (including bats and purple martins), and recipes for Garrett Juice, fire ant control drench, vinegar herbicide, Sick Tree Treatment, and Tree Trunk Goop.
Average first and last freeze dates for locations around the state.
Organic fertilizers and soil amendments: 61 varieties, including full instructions for making compost.
Organic pest control products: 30 varieties.
Common house plants and poisonous plants.
Instructions for climbing vegetable structures and bat houses.
833 gorgeous full-color photographs.

[more]

There's a Moose in My Garden

Designing Gardens in Alaska and the Far North

Brenda C. Adams

University of Alaska Press, 2013

What do you do when a young moose calf wants to dine on your freshly planted Lady’s Mantle for lunch? What plants can handle a summer of nearly endless sun? How do you harness the wild beauty of the north for your own backyard? There’s a Moose in My Garden is the first book to tackle these questions and more with practical, user-friendly advice from an award-winning gardener.

Adams provides helpful tips for Far Northern gardeners on how to design and implement successful landscape environments. The book outlines the entire planning and planting process, covering such aspects as handling low-angled sun, soft light, expansive vistas, and a cool climate.

[more]

The Tradescants' Orchard

The Mystery of a Seventeenth-Century Painted Fruit Book

Barrie Juniper and Hanneke Grootenboer

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2013

In the early seventeenth century, England’s leisured classes took an eager interest in fruits from the Mediterranean and beyond, introducing species from abroad into the kitchen gardens and orchards of grand homes. A charming collection of sixty-six early watercolors showing fecund trees with fruits hanging heavily from their branches, The Tradescants’ Orchard is a testament to these broadening horticultural horizons.

The Tradescants’ Orchard reproduces for the first time the entire manuscript, traditionally associated with the renowned father-and-son nurserymen the John Tradescants. The paintings pose many questions: Who painted them and why? What is the significance of the wildlife—birds, butterflies, frogs, and snails—that appear throughout? Why is there only one depiction of an apple tree despite its popularity? Were there others that have since gone missing?

A visual feast that will appeal to botany and gardening enthusiasts, the book also includes an introduction that maps out the mystery of how and why these enigmatic watercolors were made.

[more]

Travel Report

An Apprenticeship in the Earl of Derby’s Kitchen Gardens and Greenhouses at Knowsley, England

Hans Jancke

Harvard University Press, 2013

For centuries, travel was an important part of a gardener's initial and continuing professional training. Educational journeys to parks and gardens at home and abroad were consistently recorded in lengthy reports and articles for professional journals. The travel report by Hans Jancke (1850-1920), a court gardener who served the Prussian kings in Potsdam, Germany, is typical of this genre. Jancke's manuscript, which until now remained unpublished, describes his 1874-1875 apprenticeship at Knowsley, the seat of the Earl of Derby near Liverpool, England. Containing extensive plant lists and detailed descriptions of the horticultural regimens observed in the estate's kitchen gardens and greenhouses, the text is augmented by several measured drawings executed by Jancke. These illustrations include the hothouses used for fruit forcing, vegetable production, and exotic ornamentals, as well as a site plan based on Jancke's own survey data. Professionally focused travel journals of gardeners and garden artists were for a long time ignored as sources to be taken seriously in historical research. But Jancke's eyewitness account, especially as it documents an intense scientific curiosity, demonstrates the potential of these texts for illuminating the more technical and practical aspects of the history of the garden arts.

[more]

Twayblades and Adder's-mouth Orchids in Your Pocket

A Guide to the Native Liparis, Listera, and Malaxis Species of the Continental United States and Can

Paul Martin Brown

University of Iowa Press, 2008

Native orchids are increasingly threatened by pressure from population growth and development but, nonetheless, still present a welcome surprise to observant hikers in every state and province. Compiled and illustrated by long-time orchid specialist Paul Martin Brown, these pocket guides to the twayblades and adder’s-mouths form part of a series that will cover all the wild orchids of the continental United States and Canada.
Brown provides general distributional information, time of flowering, and habitat requirements for each species as well as a complete list of hybrids and the many different growth and color forms that can make identifying orchids so intriguing. For the twayblades and adder’s-mouths he includes information on 21 species, 1 additional variety, and 2 hybrids.
Most twayblades and adder’s-mouths are relatively small plants with tiny green flowers, but a few have richly colored blooms or particularly interesting habits that attract the native orchid enthusiast. Most of these species are easy to identify based upon their general appearance, range, and time of flowering. Answering three simple questions—when, where, and how does it grow?—and comparing the living plant with the striking photos in the backpack-friendly laminated guide should enable both professional and amateur naturalists to achieve the satisfaction of identifying a specific orchid.

[more]

Twentieth-Century New England Land Conservation

A Heritage of Civic Engagement

Charles H. W. Foster

Harvard University Press

Written by and about New Englanders, this book is relevant to others attempting to address conservation problems on a regional basis. These are the stories of people acting the New England way—recognizing a need, taking on a responsibility without being asked, and applying the Yankee attitude in order to bring about tangible conservation gains. But above all, the account is one of hope for the future for, as the authors document, conditions at the turn of the twentieth century were of a nature we would not tolerate today: cut and burned-over forests, eroded topsoil, depleted farmlands, streams choked with refuse and pollution, and species at the very brink of extinction. The stories told here are of people using what they had, setting to work to remedy these conditions, and doing so successfully. At a time of growing concern for the environment both locally and globally, theirs is a story certain to inform and inspire the next generation of conservation leaders.

[more]