Growing a Green Thumb
Looking to start a garden? Adam Frost, BBC Gardeners’ World presenter and winner of multiple Chelsea Flower Show gold medals, recently wrote a book called How to Create Your Garden. This book identifies modern garden needs, such as enhancing an urban landscape or suburban backyard. Budget and lifestyle are considered in this step-by-step gardening guide. Daryl Beyers, from the New York Botanical Garden, has a new book called The New Gardener’s Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Grow a Beautiful and Bountiful Garden. This science-oriented book is designed to help everyone with important plant topics, such as “soil, plant selection, propagation, planting and mulching, watering and feeding, pruning, and weeds, pests and diseases.” Perhaps you are interested in growing your own food. Lorene Edwards Forkner recently wrote The Beginner’s Guide to Growing Great Vegetables which takes readers through month-by-month instructions based on regional planting charts. Or maybe you are looking just for fun. Joseph Tychonievich and Liz Anna Kozik teamed up to create The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food: Step-by-Step Vegetable Gardening for Everyone. This guide, written in a graphic novel style, gives beginners tips and tricks on establishing their first vegetable gardens.
Want to enhance your current garden? Focusing on using environmentally friendly techniques can be a great way to give your garden new life. Check out Kelly D. Norris’s New Naturalism: Designing and Planting a Resilient, Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden, to bring out the wildness of your home landscape. Vincent A. Simeone’s Sustainable Gardening: Grow a “Greener” Low-maintenance Landscape with Fewer Resources also has lots of great tips, such as “harvesting rainwater for future use.” Interested in growing plants that like to grow near what you already have planted? Try out Jessica Walliser’s Plant Partners: Science-based Companion Planting Strategies for the Vegetable Garden. This book highlights plants that do well together. Want to try new vegetables that do well in New Jersey? Marie Iannotti gives readers the inside scoop on gardening in New Jersey with Grow Great Vegetables in New Jersey. Maybe you are more interested in gardening styles. Greg Loades’ The Modern Cottage Garden: A Fresh Approach to a Classic Style compares “traditional cottage garden[s to] the New Perennial movement.” Charles Chesshire (author) and Alex Ramsay (photographer) explore Japanese gardening in Japanese Gardening: A Practical Guide to Creating a Japanese-style Garden with 700 Step-by-Step Photographs. Or maybe you are looking to attract more pollinators to your garden. Barbara W. Ellis’ Attracting Birds and Butterflies: How to Plant a Backyard Habitat to Attract Winged Wildlife teaches readers about planting for hummingbirds and butterflies to make these creatures feel at home.
Not ready to commit to a large outdoor garden? The library has several books about container gardening. Check out Annette Goliti Gutierrez’s Potted: Make Your Own Stylish Garden Containers. This book encourages upcycling by taking materials meant for other projects, such as cinderblocks and paint cans, and turning them into affordable container gardens. When looking to grow flowers inside, consider orchids. Marc Hachadourian, curator of the orchid collection at the New York Botanical Garden, wrote a book called Orchid Modern: Living and Designing with the World’s Most Elegant Houseplants. With photographs by Claire Rosen, readers will learn about “his top 120 orchid picks for green and not-so-green thumbs.” Even growing fruit and veggies in containers is possible! Christy Wilhelmi teaches readers how to care for small fruit trees and berries “even in the smallest of yards” in her new book Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden: Planting and Tending Small Fruit Trees and Berries in Gardens and Containers. Jen McGuinness, author of Micro Food Gardening: Project Plans and Plants for Growing Fruits and Veggies in Tiny Spaces has directions for growing “miniature herbs and salad greens to tiny strawberry plants, baby beets and mini cabbages.” Already have houseplants, but looking for more tips to enhance their well-being? Dr. Houseplant: An Indispensable Guide to Keeping Your Indoor Plants Healthy and Happy, written be William Davidson with photographs by Janneke Luursema, guides readers through best practices for 42 common houseplants.
Have an abundance of flowers you would like to showcase? Why not try creating bouquets or flower-arrangements? Teresa H. Sabankaya writes “floral poems” in her choices of flowers and herbs used to create posies or bouquets. In The Posy Book: Garden-inspired Bouquets That Tell a Story: With a Modern Floral Dictionary, photographer Danyelle Dee and painter Maryjo Koch help illustrate how flowers and herbs can express emotions such as “gratitude, adoration and bravery” when finding inspiration from “the Victorian-era language of flowers.” Erin Benzakein, Jill Jorgensen, Julie Chai and photographer Chris Benzakein team up in Floret Farm’s a Year in Flowers: Designing Gorgeous Arrangements for Every Season to teach readers about using fresh flowers for unique and interesting arrangements year-round. Or try Seasonal Flower Arranging: Fill Your Home with Blooms, Branches and Foraged Materials All Year Round written by Ariella Chezar and Julie Michaels with photographs by Erin Kunkel.
No matter what you grow, or how you grow it, the library is here to help. This past April, in our second annual Virtual TrashedArt Contest, our second-place adult winner, Andy, won for “Bird Nest Garden.” His entry showcased the container gardens and flower beds he created with recycled materials. By learning more about creative techniques and up-to-date practices through the abundance of resources available at the library, we hope you will find your own inspiration right here in the Garden State.
- by Julia, Lawrence Headquarters Branch
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