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Section: In the Garden
Make a Gardener Happy
By Colleen Maroney Fahey
“Next year’s garden begins now. The leaves have fallen and the blooms are distant memories, leaving only the bare bones of our gardens. Winter has a way of putting us in a reflective frame of mind. It’s the time of year for planning and planting, for taking stock, and for rethinking our garden layouts and planting schemes.” And there is no better place to start than at Timber Press.
Twenty-five years ago Timber Press published its first plant book, J. D. Vertrees’s Japanese Maples. It was by no means a sure bet at the time. In those days Japanese maples were used pretty much as generic landscape plants, and little horticultural attention had been given to the wide variety of cultivars. For this reason the book had a slow start, but eventually it picked up steam as people started becoming more interested in this fascinating plant group. Essentially the book was creating its own market—and with it, a booming market for the plants as well.
The company’s founder, Richard Abel, took heed of this phenomenon, and thus was born a unique specialized publishing program directed to sophisticated gardeners, horticulturists, botanists, naturalists, landscape professionals—in short, all people with a keen interest in the world of plants.
Now, 25 years later, Timber Press is generally recognized as the world’s leading publisher of high-level horticultural books, with more than 400 titles in print. If you are looking for an impressive stocking stuffer for that gardener on your list, you might want to consider checking out two of their newest offerings:
The Curious Gardener
...the gardener will find many more answers than questions when he says “good morning“ to the garden if he is curious and observant enough to perceive the many small changes that occur every hour. This curiosity is a virtue, presenting a wealth of discoveries that together form an image of the garden. The curious gardener focusses not on the overall prettiness of the garden but on the boundless abundance of detail. If there are enough details, prettiness will take care of itself.
 Jurgen Dahl
Jurgen Dahl viewed gardens as mirror images of the world at large. A former bookseller, he gave up his shop to become a writer and gardener, and in the process became one of the world’s foremost garden writers. The author of nearly a dozen books and editor of Crossroads, an annual journal of critical thinking, The Curious Gardener is really a compilation of Dahl’s last three gardening books: The Curious Gardener: Gardening Virtues and Botanical Surprises (1998), the Stinking Garden or a Fascination with Opposites (1997) and How to Eat a Lily: The Latest News from the Garden (1995).
The Curious Gardener, the first English translation of Dahl’s work, is a collection of essays exploring the connections between the life of the garden and the life of the mind—from discussing why gardeners should grow bad-smelling plants to how readers should eat their flowers—to identifying curiosity and patience as the gardener’s chief virtue. Culled from his weekly gardening column for WDR, a large German broadcasting station, and Die Zeit, a major weekly magazine, his publishers notes that Dahl’s “insights and interpretations often are like parables, leading his reader into a universe governed by continuous change and infinite variation.”
This book is for the gardener who seeks a “well-examined life” not a how-to book—for observation is at the core of Dahl’s gardening and his stories. In “A Display for Patient People” he watches a flower unfold; and immediately on its heels in “Notes on Pruning Things into Shape” unfurls a tirade against reconstructed baroque gardens “the most arrogant and violent symbols of a feudal and hierarchical understanding of the world and nature.“
Immensely readable, his writing is sometimes poetic as in “Gray and Brown” and “New Plans”: “Oh, those autumn colors! But when all those colors have faded, when those yellow and red flames have vanished, there is brown and gray and in some places black and white, too. These are the colors of tranquility, of passing; brown for sleep, gray for calm, black for silence” and at times humorous: “Buying a tree is like getting married. One chooses, at least in principle, for life. A separation, if it does become necessary, entails considerable trouble, cost and pain.”
As Noel Kingsbury notes in his forward to The Curious Gardener, “The publication in English of Jurgen Dahl’s garden writing is long overdue...his mind is one that wanders sideways—connecting the garden with a wider world and makes it an immeasurable more interesting place.” I couldn’t agree more.
The Essential Garden Design Workbook
Where was this book when I started to design a backyard garden four years ago! Leave all the trial and error behind, this is a must have for anyone who is seriously considering designing their own garden. Full of beautiful photographs, how-to chart and detailed drawings, The Essential Garden Design Workbook by Rosemary Alexander is a clear and practical guide to every stage of garden design —from how you assess your site to experimenting with design ideas that will fit your garden surroundings. There are clear instructions for drawing up plans from initial site survey through to final design, complete with tips on drawing and rendering details to give your plans a professional touch.
Founder and principal of The English Gardening School at the Chelsea Physic Garden, London, Alexander writes and lectures worldwide on garden design. In this book she has created a wonderful, comprehensive, detailed design workbook for serious home gardeners and professionals alike. This book is not just about pretty pictures (although it is full of beautiful inspirational photos) but provides step-by-step information to make anyone’s garden dreams a reality. Although well-thought out and easy to follow, it is not for the faint of heart or those looking for the easy short-cuts. To some it might seem daunting with its numerous design components such as site surveys, scale and proportion information, as well as ground, vertical and overhead plane considerations.
One of the most interesting and unique features of the book is a sequence of model plans for a large suburban garden which provides an example of the way a plan for a particular site is developed through its various stages.
And readers listen up—there’s an additional perk to buying this book. One lucky U.S. reader of The Essential Garden Design Workbook will win a trip to England and a four-day workshop at the English Gardening School in London. Each book contains a form inviting the purchaser to write a 50-word essay on why he or she would like to attend the world-renowned English Gardening School in London. The lucky winner will attend a four-day seminar at the English Gardening School taught by Rosemary Alexander. Airfare, lodging, and tuition for the April 2005 seminar will be provided by Timber Press. It will be a present to remember.
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