Beautiful books & magazines about gardening
Let's read amongst the plants.
Reading about gardening is kind of like reading about cooking or climbing Mt. Everest: sometimes it’s even more pleasurable than the real thing. Between my research for our Garden Oracle Deck and Stephanie’s talent for filling her bookshelf with unexpected titles on a theme, together we’ve cultivated a bumper crop of books about gardens and gardening.
Whether your garden is a rambling estate, a collection of houseplants, or a dream for a future summer, here are some of our favorite publications about the joys of taming nature, or attempting to.
Related: We’re having a 20% off sale in our shop, with the code SUMMERREADING. Code expires end of day Friday, July 31st.
Top row:
In Search of Lost Roses by Thomas Christopher: An unlikely page-turner for anyone garden-minded about lost gardens and old roses and the obsessive people who traipse through graveyards and ghost towns to track them down. The Plant: Flowers are nature’s fashionistas, and this magazine takes a curious and creative approach to the intersection of style and the plant world, with all the glamour and quirk of Eartha Kitt showing off her garden. Pleasant Place: A library of pretty little magazines about the art of gardening, with themes ranging from compost to daffodils; these are made to be collected one-by-one, but can be bound together as your garden of publications takes off.
Middle row:
On the Necessity of Gardening edited by Laurie Cluitmans: Not a book to be read in order, cover-to-cover, but strolled through leisurely at random; open up this beautifully illustrated encyclopedia to any page and lose yourself in a riotous bouquet of plant lore, art inspired by gardens, literary history, ecology, and the garden as a metaphor for human life. The Garden Oracle: Draw an oracle card, gaze at its evocative collage layered with cuttings from vintage botanical illustrations and classical paintings, then dig deep into your psyche and ask, “What will my garden grow?” The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing: A beguiling account of restoring one particular garden threaded through with Laing’s explorations of other earthly and imagined paradises and the radical potentials of choosing to cultivate a spot on Earth.
Bottom row:
Edward Steichen and the Garden by Sarah Anne McNear: Steichen, best known now as a legendary photographer and curator, thought his true legacy would be his garden, especially delphiniums, which he cultivated obsessively by the thousands. The lone variety still available is Connecticut Yankee, a growable work of art. Pair with: Connecticut Yankee delphinium seeds. My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kincaid: Reflections on all the triumphs and tribulations of a garden that’s been well-tended over many years, and the traces of all the gardeners and advice-givers that flourish, die back, and return there each season. Four Hedges: A Gardener’s Chronicle by Clare Leighton: An artist’s chronicle of turning a meadow into a garden over the course of a year, organized by months and illustrated with her beautiful wood engravings of fruits and flowers. Spotted at Two Artists At Home, a shop that’s always digging up covetable antique books about flora and fauna.
Top row:
Modern Nature by Derek Jarman: Jarman bought a rundown Victorian fisherman’s hut after he was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1986 and spent most of the rest of his life there, hauling in buckets of dirt to sink into the shingle, planting poppies and sea kale and bugloss and borage and roses that somehow survived in this stony, salty place. This book is a document of his time there, a complicated season of joy and sorrow and making things grow, despite the odds. Forgotten Flowers: A Collection of Found Floral Photography: This collection of garden and flower-themed snapshots is like browsing through a flower-loving stranger’s long-lost photo album; every picture conjures a story. Sleeping With a Sunflower: A Treasury of Old-Time Garden Lore by Louise Riotte: Mixing the practical with the whimsical, this jumbly month-by-month assemblage of folk knowledge compiled in the 1980s offers everything from ghostly fishing stories to tips on keeping seeds, creating ponds, and concocting field daisy wine.
Middle row:
American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide edited by Susan Barba: An anthology of poems that feels like a bouquet gathered from meadows and roadsides. The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: The title story in this collection is a subtle stunner, an evocation of a day that is perfect until it is not, revealing the worm at the heart of the flower. An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden: Lovejoy Mason, a little girl growing up between the cracks of society, is suddenly and furiously possessed by the impulse to create a garden in her ratty, post-Blitz London neighborhood; this is the story of that garden.
Bottom row:
A Darker Wilderness edited by Erin Sharkey: Seedlike encounters with an archival object—an almanac, a family chest, a quilt—grow into a lush collection of formally ambitious essays by Black writers exploring the meaning of nature. Alluring Lettuces and Other Seductive Vegetables for Your Garden by Jack Staub: A vegetal escapist read for anyone oppressed by the sameness of the grocery-store produce section, with 75 rare options and tips for growing them. The Flower Shop by Leonard Koren: A beautiful meditation on working with and selling flowers, and the care that arrangement demands.
Alluring Lettuces!
Jamaica Kincaid!