5 Books for Inspired Gardening
We have a whole bookshelf in our home filled to bursting with gardening books. All are informative but not all are inspiring. These selections will take you straight from the couch to the garden — full of ideas and excited energy!
Our plant bookshelf boasts everything from primers on perennial gardening, to plant disease identification and treatment, to catalogs of rare Pacific Northwest natives and seed saving manuals. These tomes, many passed down by mentors or acquired as textbooks from horticultural programs- are incredibly valuable resources- but they are not page turners. When you’re not looking for step by step solutions or background information but itching for a new gardening book- you might be looking for a text that will shake you out of your gardening routines and ruts and give you some fresh perspective to help you see you garden again with the slightly teary awestruck eyes of wonder and possibility.
These books inspired us, and we selected them as the most likely to inspire you too — wherever you are at in your gardening journey. Never put your hands in the soil? Have dirt under your nails for the last couple decades? Each book offers different insights to help energize your gardening efforts no matter — all applicable to gardeners at every stage of development.
Planthunter: Truth, Beauty, Chaos & Plants
An Avant Garde(ning) Coffee Table Book by Georgina Reid
Summary: Georgina Reid travels all over the globe to interview Avante Garde(ners) of all kinds. The adjacent image is from an interview with Max Gill, a florist who sources all of his seasonal flowers from his home’s sprawling personal gardens. Some of the other subjects include Ron Filey, titled “the Gansta Gardener” who is exploring food production on sidewalk spaces in South Central LA, David Holmgren (co-creator of the concept of permaculture) on creating a higher standard of living through integrated green living spaces, and Topher Delany a landscape designer and cancer survivor focused on creating gardens for hospitals that calm, relax and inspire patients.
Why it inspired us: Each and every subject of this book demonstrates a different vision for how to think out of the box when it comes to merging plants and people for the greatest abundance, meaning and longevity of all beings involved. The book is teaming with ideas and I’m already excited to reread it again each year to see what sticks each time. After the first reading I am inspired to train a living willow archway as a new entrance to my meditation garden, set up raised beds on the concrete median next to the street to grow free food for passersby in our community, and to embrace plant maximalism inside my home by getting serious about cutting and propagating my houseplants. More than anything, this book reminded us that there is a whole rainbow spectrum of plant freaks out there and when we all raise our own banners high, we are deeply nourished by connecting as a community.
“There are no rules when it comes to gardening. You can read all you want about how to do everything right, but the only way to learn is by doing; any experienced gardener will tell you this. Here’s a fact: your new plant will die one day. It might be tomorrow, next week, or not for a few years, but it will happen. Don’t be scared. Embrace it, care for it and love it. When it dies, try to understand why and try, try again.”
Teaming with Microbes
A Soil Science Nonfiction Book by Jeff Lowenfels
Summary: Jeff Lowenfels wrote his weekly gardening column for the Anchorage Daily News for decades advocating for classic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides in the garden, until a photo of a microbe defending a tomato root changed his life. He dived deep into the science behind microbes and soil and put all of that information together into an easy to understand book for the home gardener. You may already be aware that your soil is anything but a sterile medium for growing plants, the soil is filled with legions of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms. The books breaks down each component, how they interact with each-other and plants and how you can cultivate the healthiest possible living soil system in your back yard.
Why it inspired us: Anders (our head gardener) has a science background and loves to dive into technicalities and jargon. Myself (Jessica - office manager) am more of a words person. I deeply appreciated the way that Jeff Lowenfels breaks down complex scientific concepts into metaphors and descriptions that are easy for me to understand. His friendly and cheeky writing style makes this a book I have actually reached for to reread several times. Regardless of how much of the information you retain, when you finish this book your will realize you’ve become a soil warrior. It’s impossible to learn about the complexity of the soil food web and not become inspired to fiercely protect and cultivate its biodiversity.
“If you really want to be a good gardener, you need to understand what is going on in your soil.”
The New Heirloom Garden
Designs, Interviews and Recipes by Ellen Ecker Ogden
Summary: This is perhaps the most “tradition” gardening book on this list, but Ellen Ecker Ogden still offers a totally fresh take on the concept. Beautifully designed and with stunning full color photos to spark your imagination, Ogden’s offers a treasure trove of distilled heirloom gardening experience, both on a large homestead and in a small suburban backyard. The book includes multiple heirloom garden designs based on aesthetic and food growing goals including the Italian Heirloom Garden (design complete with a pizza oven as a central point in the middle), the Color Wheel Garden (colorful heirlooms grown for both maximum nutritional yield and visual appeal), the New Heirloom Flower Garden (growing heirloom flowers for year round beauty and to create your own stunning seasonal bouquet arrangements). Each design is accompanied by an interview with a different heirloom focused garden expert offering their unique perspective. The second half of the book includes delicious heirloom centric recipes grouped by the plant type.
Why it inspired us: Well, first of all the photos are absolutely stunning and enough to inspire all by themselves. Secondly, we loved the way Ogden integrates complete systems. Each garden design has specific aesthetic and functional goals, with a result that is efficient, beautiful and highly productive. Instead of taking the “trying to fit in as much as you can” or “trying to do everything,” Ogden focuses on staying realistic with what can be accomplished in your space with the time you have available and sticking to the vision created from that. I think most gardeners can use a little inspiration on the benefits of staying realistic with your garden dreams. We also absolutely love how much details and lovingly collected information the book contains on specific heirloom cultivars and varieties. I found myself taking notes the whole time on new tomato varieties or whole vegetables I had never considered growing for my seed orders next year.
“You may have a one-square-foot plot rubbing shoulders with the kitchen door or a wilderness waiting to be tames, but planting a garden of any size is an opportunity to dig deeper into the past, to rediscover old varieties that have largely been dropped from the seed catalogs, to change the way we have been gardening for the past century, and to turn back the clock to pay attention to why seeds matter in the long run.”
Finding the Mother Tree - Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
A riveting memoir by forest ecologist Suzanne Simard
Summary: A memoir from a forest ecologist, what does that have to do with gardening? The whole message of this book is to reveal the deep interconnectedness of all plants (and living beings) - starting with the forest but certainly not ending there. Suzanne Simard grew up in a traditional sustainable logging family in BC, only to go on to spend her early career working as a silviculturist with big timber companies. She watched lawmakers enact the “Free to Grow” laws, lobbied by Monsanto, making it illegal for logging companies to NOT spray herbicide on all other plants in a logged area other than the species they wanted to grow back. Simard was then forced to study the devastating effects of these laws, and fell down a decades long research rabbit hole that lead to the groundbreaking discovery of the concept of Mother Trees. I won’t try to explain in detail here when the book does such an incredibly job but basically Simard discovered that trees exist in families that work together through diverse and specific mycorrhizal fungi connections (the info from Teaming with Microbes becomes helpful here). These connections allow communication, intelligence and nutrients to be shared between the trees to support the whole forest.
Why it inspired us: Simard’s creative field experiments exploring the symbiosis between overstory (the uppermost canopy) and understory (the saplings and shrubs below) provides lots of directly applicable knowledge to gardeners approaching their green space with a permaculture mindset and also inspired us to do more studied experimenting in our work. Understanding how plants communicate and help each other grow to maximum diversity and health over decades has inspired us to take a longer term planning view in the gardens we work in. Thinking 5 years ahead is actually a very short timeline and the minimum view for any garden project. On top of the riveting scientific information, Simard’s memoir provides an endlessly inspiring illustration of how to live a life dedicated to improving the relationship between plants and people- a much needed role model in a modern world fraught with climate crisis.
“Plants are attuned to one another’s strengths and weaknesses, elegantly giving and taking to attain exquisite balance. There is grace in complexity, in actions cohering, in sum totals.”
Second Nature: A Gardeners Education
A book of essays by journalist Michael Pollan
Summary: Celebrated journalist Michael Pollan has been a keen observer of landscapes since his childhood growing up in a suburbia, where his father was the only man on the block who refused to mow his lawn. Pollan’s interest in the history of American landscaping and the tension between wildness and order in gardening, mixed with his own experiences gardening everywhere from a wild gully in his neighborhood as a teen to later purchasing and renovating the grounds of his run down Connecticut dairy farm- this book captures the everyday joys and frustrations of gardening as well as the big picture trends and implications of gardening culture.
Why it inspired us: Michael Pollan is one of those writers who can write about any topic and I’ll dive in headfirst and finish the book the same day. So when I saw this book specific to one of my all time favorite topics to nerd out about — gardening — I was already excited. The most inspiring aspect of this book to me came from learning about the history of American gardens and landscaping as a whole, and affirming that what we do outside is a choice of direction for the future. Do we want to perpetuate the sterile “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality that has created hundreds of thousands of unused front lawns across America, or do we want to raise our plant freak flags high and be an example to our neighborhoods and friends of what it means to have a wild, playful and fulfilling relationship with the green spaces we steward? The answer is quite clear to me.
“The gardener learns nothing when his carrots thrive, unless that success is won against a background of prior disappointment. Outright success is dumb, disaster frequently eloquent. At least to the gardener who knows how to listen.”
Conclusion:
Are you ready for the best part? All of these books are available in the Seattle Public Library system! Although all of theses titles are quite worthy of a permanent place on the book shelf and ripe for sharing with friends, gardening inspiration can be as cheap as the time it takes to place a hold at your local branch and go pick it up.
We’ve been deeply enjoying (now that the libraries are open again) the opportunity to physically go to the plant section and let inspiration guide us to the spines we need to take home. What gardening , plant or gardening-adjacent books have been inspiring you lately? We would love to check them out.
