Gardens reveal the relationship between culture and nature, yet in the vast library of garden literature few books focus on what the garden means - on the ecology of garden as idea, place, and action. The Meaning of Gardens maps out how the garden is perceived, designed, used, and valued. Essays from a variety of disciplines are organized around six metaphors special to our time - the garden muses of Faith, Power, Ordering, Cultural Expression, Personal Expression, and Healing. Each muse suggests specific inspirations for garden and landscape design.

Alternating discursive accounts with fictional vignettes that recreate time and place, this book skillfully integrates the history of French gardens with the modern history of ideas.Denise Le Dantec is a poet and Professor of Philosophy at the Centre National d'Enseignement a "istance, Paris. Jean-Pierre Le Dantec is a Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Paris La-Villette.

A classic in the literature of the garden, Green Thoughts is a beautifully written and highly original collection of seventy-two essays, alphabetically arranged, on topics ranging from "Annuals" and "Artichokes" to "Weeds" and "Wildflowers." An amateur gardener for over thirty years, Eleanor Perenyi draws upon her wide-ranging knowledge of gardening lore to create a delightful, witty blend of how-to advice, informed opinion, historical insight, and philosophical musing. There are entries in praise of earthworms and in protest of rock gardens, a treatise on the sexual politics of...

First published in Britain in 1956 and never before available in America, We Made a Garden is the classic story of a unique and enduring English country garden. One of Britain's most esteemed gardening writers recounts how she and her husband set about creating an exemplary cottage garden from unpromising beginnings on the site of the former farmyard and rubbish heap that surround their newly purchased home in the countryside of Somerset, England. Each imbued with a strong set of horticultural opinions and passions, Mr. and Mrs. Fish negotiate the terrain of their garden, by turns...

From the internationally acclaimed Czech writer Karel Capek comes this beautifully written and marvelously apt account of the trials and tribulations of the gardener's life. First published in Prague in 1929, The Gardener's Year combines a richly comic portrait of life in the garden, narrated month by month, with a series of delightful illustrations by the author's older brother and collaborator, Josef. Capek's gardeners--all too human, despite their lofty aspirations--often look the fool, whether they be found sopping wet, victims of the cobralike water hose, or hunched over, hands...

For readers who like gardening (and love the English language), this posthumous collection of Mitchell's "Washington Post" "Earthman" columns is "equal parts entertainment and shrewd horticultural advice" ("Science News").

In the sequel to The Essential Earthman, the Washington Post columnist offers a harvest of sharp observations and humorous adventures gathered during a year in his garden, along with much down-to-earth advice on horticulture.

Gardening at the Dragon's Gate is fundamental work that permeates your entire life. It demands your energy and heart, and it gives you back great treasures as well, like a fortified sense of humor, an appreciation for paradox, and a huge harvest of Dinosaur kale and tiny red potatoes.

For more than thirty years, Wendy Johnson has been meditating and gardening at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in northern California, where the fields curve like an enormous green dragon between the hills and the ocean. Renowned for its pioneering role in California's food revolution, Green Gulch...

With the same warmth, wisdom, wit, and accessibility that readers have come to love and trust in her monthly column, House & Garden editor in chief Dominique Browning offers this lively, charming, and instructive story of restoring a neglected suburban garden.
When a retaining wall in Browning's New York suburban garden collapsed, she was forced into action. Paths of Desire is the enchanting, amusing, and moving account of making a garden -- and confronting the essence of suburban gardening, with its idiosyncratic ecosystem. This meant struggling with depraved skunks and...

In his articles and in best-selling books such as The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan has established himself as one of our most important and beloved writers on modern man s place in the natural world. A new literary classic, Second Nature has become a manifesto not just for gardeners but for environmentalists everywhere. As delicious a meditation on one man s relationships with the Earth as any you are likely to come upon (The New York Times Book Review), Second Nature captures the rhythms of our everyday engagement with the outdoors in all its glory and exasperation. With chapters ranging...

Patricia Klindienst crossed the country to write this book, inspired by a torn and faded photograph that shed new light on the story of her Italian immigrant family's struggle to adapt to America. She gathered the stories of urban, suburban, and rural gardens created by people rarely presented in books about American gardens: Native Americans, immigrants from across Asia and Europe, and ethnic peoples who were here long before our national boundaries were drawn--including Hispanics of the Southwest, whose ancestors followed the Conquistadors into the Rio Grande Valley, and Gullah gardeners of...

Through the Garden Gate is a collection of 144 of the popular weekly articles that Elizabeth Lawrence wrote for The Charlotte Observer from 1957 to 1971. With those columns, a delightful blend of gardening lore, horticultural expertise, and personal adventures, Lawrence inspired thousands of southern gardeners.

" A] fine contribution to the green-thumb genre.--Publishers Weekly

First published in 1929, The Gardener's Bed-Book is a much beloved gardening classic by the renowned editor of House & Garden magazine in the 1920s and '30s. Each of its 365 perfectly sized little essays is meant to be read in bed at night after a long day's work, either real or imagined, in the garden. A charming and mischievously funny companion to curl up with, Wright ranges comfortably--and lyrically--from giving gardening advice to meditating on such topics as antique collecting and travel, great literature and architecture. He is an addictive delight, as memorable...

From his New Mexico mountain home, award-winning author Stanley Crawford writes about growing garlic and selling it. The book is a favourite not only for its assemblage of garlic and farming lore but for what it tells us about how to live a satisfying life. This beloved book, first published in 1992, is now available only from the University of New Mexico Press.

The author has trailed, traced, and tracked down hundreds of literary references to many of our favorite flowers.

Sara Midda's richly illustrated In and Out of the Garden has delighted readers and critics alike. Diana Vreeland praised it as "delightful and delicious," and Laura Ashley called it "pure inspiration."

The most elegant and subtle of books to give and to have, it evokes the English gardens of Sara Midda's childhood, sowing the imagination with glorious images. Dozens and dozens of illustrations and tender reflections recall a hut in the wood, or a topiary maze, a summer day spent podding peas, or an herb patch that yields Biblical fragrances. Ruby-red radishes are the jewels of the...

Reminiscences of Gertrude Jekyll's childhood and early interest in plants. First published 1908, and written in a simple style for the young, it describes seeds, germination, flowers, fruits and gardens. Although she had no children of her own, she was very fond of them and took many fine photographs of children, particularly the younger members of her own family. Garden legend Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) became a horticulturalist and garden designer, after building a considerable reputation as an artist and craftswoman. She is well known for her association with the English architect, Sir...

"Though an old man," Thomas Jefferson wrote at Monticello, "I am but a young gardener." Every gardener is.

In Gardening in Eden, we enter Arthur Vanderbilt's small enchanted world of the garden, where the old wooden trestle tables of a roadside nursery are covered in crazy quilts of spring color, where a catbird comes to eat raisins from one's hand, and a chipmunk demands a daily ration of salted cocktail nuts. We feel the oppressiveness of endless winter days, the magic of an old-fashioned snow day, the heady, healing qualities of wandering through a greenhouse on a frozen...