TV, Books and Mags

by Special Guest Blogger Carol Stocker, Boston Globe Garden Writer
Ruth Kassinger has written my favorite gardening book of the year (so far). This is the story of a homeowner who started with zero gardening knowledge, but built a lush plant conservatory onto her Maryland home that became a center for family life, entertaining, and most importantly her own revitalization after a bout with cancer.

Ruth Kassinger had been hit hard by her sister’s cancer death at 45, followed closely by her own battle with breast cancer. Seeking a healing retreat, she visited the conservatory of the U.S. Botanical Garden on the Washington Mall. That’s where she got the idea to build her own private green oasis, “the perfect antidote to the losses and changes of middle age.”

She surprised herself as much as her family because she had never before been interested in gardening or houseplants and hated earthworms and insects. But the indoor garden she envisioned would be a clean, bright, earthworm- and insect-free cocoon for healing.

She searches out a builder, deals with zoning ordinances and gets houseplant advice from her local nursery. She visits specialty growers in Florida, Connecticut and California. She discovers which low-maintenance kinds of plants perform well in her growing conditions. She also learns how to grow butterflies in her conservatory and how to combat scale and spider mites. The first appearance of bugs in her paradise sets off a frenzied over-reaction, colored by her belief that she and her doctors had been slow to diagnose her cancer.  But after researching the most toxic of insect-killers, a kind of chemo for the greenhouse, she comes to her senses and employs Neem and other less poisonous Integrated Pest Management techniques.

Though it gets off to slow start, this book sneaks up on you. It gradually builds in technical complexity as well as emotional depth, so that by the time you finish it, you’re surprised by how much you’ve learned while following the author on her journey back to life. There’s how-to advice on building a functioning plant conservatory, up-to-date scientific information about green industry technology (such as “living walls”) that you can employ in your home projects, plus a history of greenhouses, and amusing character portraits of some of the country’s leading houseplant growers.

Readers will find this book is an antidote for the blues of a midwinter’s day or midlife malaise. But watch out. You may start out growing houseplants, and end up building a greenhouse.

I think this would make an excellent gift book for gardeners, and it is also a book of life and hope for readers who have struggled against cancer. And that is not exactly a small niche audience these days.

Also, this is a pretty book, and gifts should be pretty. The cover illustration of a charismatic white highland terrier peaking out from the midst of a sun room full of giant tropical plants by artist Linda Button and the line drawings throughout the text by Eva-Maria Ruhl are both effective and appealing.

Kassinger’s own epiphany at the end is that nothing in a garden, even an indoor garden, is static. Her original idea of paradise was to create an unchanging cocoon. But after making constant experiments with her own biosphere project, she has concluded that “Paradise” is a place where there’s always something new to respond to, and to look forward to. Life is change.

Paradise Under Glass; An Amateur Creates a Conservatory Garden, by Ruth Kassinger (William Morrow, $24.99)

Rosalind Creasy is the undisputed high priestess of growing food - beautifully.  Her publisher calls her 1982 Edible Landscaping a “groundbreaking classic” and that’s no exaggeration. 

But it’s high time for an update, and let’s start with Ros herself.  She’s taken it upon herself to create and document photographically as many beautiful ways to grow food as she could cram into her front yard after ripping up the lawn.  It’s her only sunny spot and she was determinerd to put that soil to its  “highest and noblest use” - growing food.  To that end, she redesigned that spot 50 times since ‘84, with trial gardens and later, theme gardens, one of which you see on the book cover.  (No doubt all of her designs have flown in the face of the contempt toward growing edibles summed up by one of her design professors: “It’s tacky.”)

As a designer she’s changed over the years, and now includes more structure, bolder colors, more heirlooms (she’s passionate about saving them) and more spaces for kids. 

But designing great gardens isn’t all Ros did to prepare for the long-awaited update to Edible Landscaping.  She consulted with or photographed gardens of scores of experts across North America.  And she’s pulled together the latest, most vetted advice about the basics of gardening itself - how to garden and with what (not peat moss).  So I was surprised to discover in this edition the likes of: organic lawn care, the need to reduce light pollution, and the real deal about recycled plastics (they eventually end up in the landfill, anyway), fertilizers even vegans will love, and wildlife, in addition to permaculture, Slow Food, great design, and an exhaustive encyclopedia of edible plants.

The result is more than the modest “update” conveys.  It’s a stunning and inspiring book that’s also how-to writing at its best.  I can’t recommend it highly enough - and with no reservations at all.  No nits to pick or suggestions from me this time.  It’s that good.

  
Some Details of Interest

• The photos don’t just show fancy-pants designs like the one above, but also plenty of more do-able gardens for regular people, like the two below.
• There’s plenty of help for beginners, including a difficulty score for each plant.
• Eighteen years ago she had to make the case for growing organically, but no longer - her readers already know that.  Progress.
• When Ros wrote her original proposal to Sierra Books she included a jar of homemade organic applesauce with a label reading “This does NOT contain…” followed by dozens of chemicals.  Aspiring authors, take note.
• One of her pet peeves is the “county fair, blue ribbon syndrome - the relentless search for huge, flawless flowers, vegetables, and fruits…No one ever tastes these prizewinners.”

 
Above, great use of an unused driveway.

  
Above, in the no-man’s-land between Ros’s driveway and her neighbor’s, she grows assorted fruits, nuts and berries.

  
Above, a mixed front-yard garden that fits in anywhere.

Materials from Edible Landscaping by Rosalind Creasy, published in 2010 by Sierra Club Books.  Photographs copyright © Rosalind Creasy, except for my photograph of her, taken over dinner at Fordhook Farm.

I read surprisingly few gardening books, maybe because after all these years I think - what could be new?  So I’m pleasantly surprised when I come across a new book that does seem new, at least to me, and here are three that I actually read and enjoyed.

Gardening for a Lifetime by Sydney Eddison 
This may seem like a book for older gardeners, but it’s not.  It’s for low-mobility and low-maintenance gardeners of all types - and doesn’t that include most of us?  And this long-time gardener covers not just the usual ways to garden with less physical strain - raised beds - but tips we don’t usually see, like switching out perennials and annuals for shrubs, and how to find hired help.

Favorite quotes?  “It took a great deal of effort to make my garden as high-maintenance as it is,” and she “loved digging great big holes and moving plants around all the time.  That was the point of it all.” So it’s due entirely to annoying developments like hip replacement surgery that Eddison even considered switching to low-maintenance gardening.

Eddison is also simply a delight to read.  Honest writing from someone who’s been there, but doesn’t pretend she knows better than anyone else.  Now I’ll have to check out her five previous books. 

I had the chance to chat with Eddison by phone and was so taken with her, I’m bound and determined to visit her and her garden…somewhere in Connecticut.

Energy-Wise Landscape Design by Sue Reed 

Doubtful at first that I needed a whole book to tell me to grow shade trees, I was surprised to find that Energy-Wise Landscape Design covers the whole waterfront of eco-gardening - buying locally grown plants, avoiding peatmoss, conserving water, improving the soil, filling our gardens with as many large, healthy plants as possible, and more.  All very thorough, readable, and practical, from a Massachusetts garden designer. 

My favorite part of the book is the large section dealing with lawns - a hot topic today.  Reed’s message isn’t anti-lawn but simply: Why have more than you need?  And if you DO have lawn, her “Five Problems with Conventional Lawn Treatment” might inspire you to switch to the more natural lawn care she promotes.  

Garden Bouquets and Beyond by Suzy Bales

 I swear, I’d never once shown an interest in flower arranging, but this engaging writer changed that.  In her latest book Suzy Bales turns readers on to some very cool and unconventional techniques for arranging, plus topics like mock topiaries, mini-trees, and how to coax buds to open.  And she uses not just the predictable flowers but also vines, foliage, shrubs and tree branches.  I’ve long been a fan of Bales’s writing (starting with her Down to Earth Gardener) and this, her fourth book, didn’t disappoint. 

And Bales is one garden writer whose garden I HAVE actually seen - just this summer I visited her in her Long Island garden. So how about sometime this winter when we’re starved for color we take a tour through Suzy’s garden - and then tour all the other awesome Long Island gardens she showed me over two action-packed days of touring? Okay, it’s a date.