Green Thumb Not Required

I am not a gardener.  My husband is the one in our family who likes planning, seeding, tending to, and harvesting our home garden.  He enjoys the whole process and he encourages the rest of our family to get in on the fun, producing vegetables, herbs, and flowers for our home.  I certainly appreciate the end results, especially when I see all the time and effort he puts into the garden.  I can honestly attest that a there is nothing like the flavor of a homegrown tomato.

When a patron inquired about starting a Gardening Book Club at the branch, I was hesitant, especially due to my lack of horticultural knowledge.  Little did I know how much I would enjoy the titles we’ve read thus far.  We have covered a selection of non-fiction, as well as fiction, and each book has truly been a fascinating experience in it’s own right.  A majority of the regulars are accomplished gardeners, but even with my lack of gardening skills, I would highly recommend any of the following titles to anyone looking for a good read.

I find I am constantly on the lookout for interesting titles -- fiction and non-fiction -- having to do with gardening, plants, nature, or the land.  Do you have any titles you would recommend to a Gardening Book Club?  If so, please let me know via the comments section. I still may not help out in my family’s home garden, but I look forward to unearthing new titles to read!

Fiction

The Garden of Evening Mists
by Twan Eng Tan
In 1951, Yun Ling, the only survivor of a Japanese war camp, seeks shelter with Aritomo, the owner of the only Japanese garden in Malaya. As the months pass, Aritomo and Yun Ling open to each other, revealing life-altering secrets.

The Language of Flowers
by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
When Victoria Jones starts working for a florist, she realizes her talent with flowers helps her change the lives of the people who buy her creations. When she must confront her painful past, she has to decide how much she is willing to change.

The Overstory
by Richard Powers
A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

The Signature of All Things
By Elizabeth Gilbert
Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker, a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry's brilliant daughter, Alma inherits both her father's money and his mind.

Non-Fiction

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver
Hang on for the ride: with characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life, and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World
by Michael Pollan
In 1637, one Dutchman paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price of a town house in Amsterdam. Three and a half centuries later, Amsterdam is once again the mecca for people who care passionately about one particular plant -- though this time the obsessions revolve around the intoxicating effects of marijuana rather than the visual beauty of the tulip. How could flowers, of all things, become such objects of desire that they can drive men to financial ruin? In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. In telling the stories of four familiar plant species that are deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, Pollan illustrates how they evolved to satisfy humankinds's most basic yearnings -- and by doing so made themselves indispensable. For, just as we've benefited from these plants, the plants, in the grand co-evolutionary scheme that Pollan evokes so brilliantly, have done well by us. The sweetness of apples, for example, induced the early Americans to spread the species, giving the tree a whole new continent in which to blossom. So who is really domesticating whom? Weaving fascinating anecdotes and accessible science into gorgeous prose, Pollan takes us on an absorbing journey that will change the way we think about our place in nature.

The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats
by Daniel Stone
In the nineteenth-century, American meals were about subsistence, not enjoyment. Agriculture yielded stable, basic crops like soybeans, corn, and barley, and few growers considered variety or flavor. But as a new century approached, appetites broadened, and David Fairchild, a young botanist with an insatiable hunger to explore and experience the world, set out in search of foods that would enrich the American farmer and enchant the American eater. Boarding a steamship, Fairchild embarked with little money and even less confidence, but he abounded with curiosity. Soon he fell in with an eccentric San Francisco millionaire named Barbour Lathrop, who took a shine to the awkward young man and financed his wanderlust. Across oceans and over rails, up mountainsides and through the surf of tropical beaches, they visited five continents and more than fifty countries, encountering cultures unimaginable to his neighbors back home. Kale from Croatia, mangoes from India, and hops from Bavaria. Peaches from China, avocados from Chile, and pomegranates from Malta. Fairchild's finds weren't just limited to food: From Egypt he sent back a variety of cotton that revolutionized an industry, and from Japan he introduced the cherry blossom tree, forever brightening America's capital. Along the way he was arrested, caught diseases, and bargained with island tribes but his culinary ambition came during a formative era, the golden age of science, travel, and a world growing more connected; and through him, America's food system was transformed into the most diverse ever.

Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation
by Andrea Wulf
From the author of the acclaimed The Brother Gardeners, a fascinating look at the founding fathers from the unique and intimate perspective of their lives as gardeners, plantsmen, and farmers. For the founding fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions, as deeply ingrained in their characters as their belief in liberty for the nation they were creating. Andrea Wulf reveals for the first time this aspect of the revolutionary generation. She describes how, even as British ships gathered off Staten Island, George Washington wrote his estate manager about the garden at Mount Vernon; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson's and John Adams's faith in their fledgling nation; how a trip to the great botanist John Bartram's garden helped the delegates of the Constitutional Congress break their deadlock; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of American environmentalism. These and other stories reveal a guiding but previously overlooked ideology of the American Revolution. Founding Gardeners adds depth and nuance to our understanding of the American experiment, and provides us with a portrait of the founding fathers as they've never before been seen

- Anna V., Hopewell Branch

Japanese Garden courtesy of shebalso