Books for National Gardening Day

Beginner Gardening Step by Step
A Visual Guide to Yard and Garden Basics

Emma Tennant, Jane Simmonds, Megan Douglass

Gardening Step By Step shows you the basics to get your green space under control and keep it that way. In this expert text, you’ll find simple step-by-step instructions, with clear images to help you create your dream garden, no matter the size and scale.

From planting decorative climbers to growing your own fruits and vegetables, these easy steps will make a big difference in how your garden and landscape look and feel. Take the anxiety out of planting, potting, and pruning and enjoy your lush lawn, beautiful landscape, and bountiful garden.

Container and Fragrant Gardens
How to Enliven Spaces With Containers and Make the Most of Scented Plants

Peter Loewer

This handy gardening guide, filled with straightforward garden care advice, shows readers how to enliven spaces with containers and how to make the most of scented flowers and leaves.

Container Gardener’s Handbook
Pots, Techniques, and Projects to Transform Any Space

Frances Tophill

Add Some Greenery to Your Life! This book will show you how to use overlooked pots to their full potential and transform your garden—whether you’ve only got a modest balcony, a small square of patio or just a windowsill.

Container Gardener’s Handbook covers a range of different planting schemes and types of container, from urns and troughs to chimney stacks and hanging baskets. You’ll find expert advice here on what to grow, from bonsais, bulbs and bamboos to tumbling and creeping plants and flowers—and learn how to make a living wall, a pond in a metal trough, or even your own homemade containers.

Floratopia
110 Flower Garden Ideas for Your Yard, Patio, or Balcony

Jan Johnsen

Create a flower haven with help from a veteran garden designer and floral expert.

Floratopia showcases beautiful flower varieties, ideas for designing a gorgeous flower space, and instructions for planting and maintaining flowers that are ideal for your zone, climate, and garden layout. Ideas include the Art of Raking, Shade Gardens, Herbs and Flowers, Edible Flowers, the Drought-Resistant Garden, Mindful Weeding, the Meadow Garden, and much more. Every idea is a lens for viewing your garden’s potential, whether it’s an expansive front yard or a just a windowsill.

The Flower-Powered Garden
Supercharge Your Borders and Containers With Bold, Colourful Plant Combinations

Andy Vernon

The Flower-Powered Garden urges home gardeners to embrace one of the most joyful and important parts of the garden: color!

Andy Vernon, a self-professed flower fanatic, highlights perennials and annuals that pack a punch, and shares 15 color combinations that can be used in containers and gardens. Vernon also shares basic gardening tips, with helpful advice on planting, watering, soil, and growing in containers. This colorful guide has everything you need to supercharge your garden with the power of flowers!

Gardening With Biochar
Supercharge Your Soil With Bioactivated Charcoal: Grow Healthier Plants, Create Nutrient-Rich Soil, and Increase Your Harvest

Jeff Cox

In this highly accessible handbook, long-time garden writer Jeff Cox explains what biochar is and provides detailed instructions for how it can be made from wood or other kinds of plant material, along with specific guidelines for using it to enrich soil, prevent erosion, and enhance plant growth. Now widely available at garden centers, biochar is also being lauded for its ability to sequester carbon in the soil, making it good for the health of the planet as well as the plants.

Gardening Your Front Yard
Projects and Ideas for Big & Small Spaces

Tara Nolan

With her unique combination of DIY/building savvy and gardening expertise, author Tara Nolan weaves you past the main pitfalls you may encounter when trying to fit a garden or gardens between your home and the street. This beautiful and comprehensive book shows how to accomplish several hardscape projects, such as building front patios, borders, edging, and walkways, as well as making your own raised beds, planting containers, trellises, rose arbors, privacy screens, and more-all custom-designed for the rigors of front-yard gardening.

Growing Perennial Foods
A Field Guide to Raising Resilient Herbs, Fruits & Vegetables

Acadia Tucker

A regenerative farmer who is deeply concerned about global warming, Tucker believes there may be no better time to plant these hardy crops. Perennials can weather climate extremes, promote healthy soil, mitigate drought conditions, and thrive without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Many can be harvested year round. They taste good, pack lots of nutrients, and require little tending. In short, the world is a better place with more perennials in it and this book intends to get us there.

Most of the book is dedicated to profiles of popular perennial herbs, fruit, and vegetables, with explicit instructions on how to plant, grow, and harvest them. Tucker also offers suggestions on how to store and preserve perennials.

Growing Under Cover
Techniques for a More Productive, Weather-Resistant, Pest-Free Vegetable Garden

Niki Jabbour

Increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and pest infestations are challenging today’s vegetable gardeners. In this in-depth guide, Jabbour shows how to use small solutions like cloches, row covers, shade cloth, cold frames, and hoophouses, as well as larger protective structures like greenhouses and polytunnels, to create controlled growing spaces for vegetables to thrive.

Photographed in her own super-productive garden, Jabbour highlights the many benefits of using protective covers to plant earlier, eliminate pests, and harvest a healthier, heartier bounty year round. With enthusiasm, inventive techniques, and proven, firsthand knowledge, this book provides invaluable advice from a popular and widely respected gardening authority.

Lawns Into Meadows
Growing a Regenerative Landscape

Owen Wormser

In a world where lawns have wreaked havoc on our natural ecosystems, meadows offer a compelling solution. They establish wildlife and pollinator habitats. They’re low-maintenance and low-cost. They have a built-in resilience that helps them weather climate extremes, and they can draw down and store far more carbon dioxide than any manicured lawn. They’re also beautiful, all year round.

Owen describes how to plant an organic meadow that’s right for your site, whether it’s a yard, community garden, or tired city lot. H

The Lifelong Gardener
Garden With Ease & Joy at Any Age

Toni Gattone

You can keep gardening for life, you just need to make adjustment as you age.

In The Lifelong Gardener, adaptive gardening expert Toni Gattone shares her proven methods for making your favorite hobby easier on your aging body; techniques that that will help you garden smarter, not harder. This helpful guide includes dozens tried-and-true methods that help eliminate the physical strain of gardening, like buying ergonomic tools, using raised beds, and moving tools around in bins on wheels.

Low-Maintenance Vegetable Gardening
Bumper Crops in Minutes a Day Using Raised Beds, Planning and Plant Selection

Clare Matthews

Spend less time in the garden—and get more results! This book demystifies the growing of fruit and vegetables and shows that, with the right approach, it can be done successfully as a weekend project or slotted into a busy week.

Experienced garden designer Clare Matthews explains simple short cuts and unusual low maintenance strategies that really work. Her book is filled with inspirational color photography from her own weekend vegetable garden where the principles promoted in this book have been tried, tested and proven.

Mastering the Art of Flower Gardening
A Gardener’s Guide to Growing Flowers, From Today’s Favorites to Unusual Varieties

Matt Mattus

A comprehensive and highly practical study of the art of growing flowers, Mastering the Art of Flower Gardening presents expert tips on growing both annuals and biennials (including native and heirloom species) alongside hundreds of lush photographs.

Perfect Pots for Small Spaces
20 Creative Container Gardening Projects

George Carter

Containers come in all sorts of materials, sizes, and shapes, and can be used to enhance any outdoor space, from a small terrace to a large garden. In this highly informative and superbly illustrated book, award-winning gardener George Carter explains how to make the most of them.

Divided into four sections on terra cotta, masonry, metal, and wood, it has step-by-step instructions and ideas for seasonal planting plans that make container gardening accessible to all. Among the imaginative projects are painted pots, a wirework hanging basket, a rustic window box, a trough with trellis screen, a wooden obelisk, and a painted galvanized washtub.

The Pollinator Victory Garden
Win the War on Pollinator Decline With Ecological Gardening: How to Attract and Support Bees, Beetles, Butterflies, Bats, and Other Pollinators

Kim Eierman

The passion and urgency that inspired WWI and WWII Victory Gardens is needed today to meet another threat to our food supply and our environment—the steep decline of pollinators.

Pollinators are critical to our food supply and responsible for the pollination of the vast majority of all flowering plants on our planet. Beetles, bats, birds, butterflies, moths, flies, wasps, and even some mosquito species, can be pollinators. But many pollinators are in trouble, and the reality is that most of our landscapes have little to offer them. By using proper cultural practices in your garden, choosing the right plant for the right location, and by attracting “nature’s pest control” (beneficial insects that act as natural enemies), you can keep nature in balance and give pollinators a fighting chance.

The Pw Proven Winners Garden Book
Simple Plans, Picture-Perfect Plants, and Expert Advice for Creating a Gorgeous Garden

Ruth Rogers Clausen, Thomas Christopher

The leading international plant brand provides aspiring horticulturists with the definitive guide to growing their own gardens with tips and advice on selecting a design and buying the right plants to add color and curb appeal.

Regrow Your Veggies
Growing Vegetables From Roots, Cuttings and Scraps

Melissa Raupach, Felix Lill

There’s no need to keep buying the same vegetables you eat all the time. This insightful guide will show you how to recycle and regrow more than 20 popular fresh vegetables right at home, from cabbage to coriander. Reduce waste, save money, and regrow your veggies the right (and easy) way!

Saving Seeds
A Home Gardener’s Guide to Preserving Plant Biodiversity

Dan Jason

Many households grow fruits, herbs, vegetables or flowers for personal use, and each of these home gardens has the potential to preserve vital biodiversity, if only we would let plants go to seed, harvest and preserve them.

Saving Seeds is a clear and winsome introduction to the essentials of seed saving, from seed selection criteria to harvest and storage tips. It also addresses the role of seed-saving communities: local swaps, seed companies, friends and neighbors and even how the Internet can support this time-honored practice.

A Way to Garden
A Hands-On Primer for Every Season

Margaret Roach

For Margaret Roach, gardening is more than a hobby; it’s a calling. Her unique approach, which she calls “horticultural how-to and woo-woo” is a blend of vital information you need to memorize and intuitive steps you must simply feel and surrender to.

Roach imparts decades of garden wisdom on seasonal gardening, ornamental plants, vegetable gardening, design, gardening for wildlife, organic practices, and much more. She also challenges gardeners to think beyond their garden borders and to consider the ways gardening can enrich the world.

The Well-Gardened Mind
The Restorative Power of Nature

Sue Stuart-Smith

A distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener offers an inspiring and consoling work about the healing effects of gardening and its ability to decrease stress and foster mental well-being in our everyday lives.

The garden is often seen as a refuge, a place to forget worldly cares, removed from the “real” life that lies outside. But when we get our hands in the earth we connect with the cycle of life in nature through which destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal. The Well-Gardened Mind provides a new perspective on the power of gardening to change people’s lives. Sue Stuart-Smith investigates the many ways in which mind and garden can interact and explores how the process of tending a plot can be a way of sustaining an innermost self.