Blog by Lanie Keystone
With the holidays quickly approaching, there’s nothing better for your gardening friends and family than a hot-off-the-press book. In my last blog, the gift list was aimed at the young gardeners in your life. Now it’s time to take a look at a few volumes that are sure to please the adult recipients on your list. The choices this year are delightful and varied. Here are two gift ideas among many.
Our first suggestion is The Curious Kitchen Gardener: Uncommon Plants and How to Eat Them.
Written by Linda Ziedrich, some of you might recognize her as the Master Gardener and Master Food Preserver who has written several other books, as well as a most informative blog from the Pacific Northwest.
In this latest book, Linda proposes viewing your garden with an eye to the unusual and unexpected. As she explains it, the book is a culmination of 45 years of gardening and experimentation—starting in Palo Alto, CA, then on to Somerville, MA, and on to live on a small farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley—with a few more stops along the way before that.
According to Ziedrich, the book is part cookbook but does focus more on gardening than cooking. The intriguing part is that the plants included are not well-known. Using the edible parts of these underused plants, Linda delves into an introduction to the plant’s history, as well as their growing and harvest needs and uses. She has arranged the chapters chronologically with regard to harvest time—from early spring through winter. And, being the wonderful experimental cook that she is, she includes a recipe for each.
Among the 33 chapters, we are introduced to such unusual culinary options as: Sweet Violets; Angelica: Bitter and Sweet; Kale Buds and Collard Tops; Homemade Chicory Coffee; Tasting Lavender; Black and Blue Tomatoes; and Sweet Parsnips. The writing is a delight, and the illustrative photographs make each chapter a joy to read.
A completely different pick is A Year in Bloom: Flowering Bulbs for Every Season, by Lucy Bellamy, with photographs by Jason Ingram. This delicious book illustrates just how important bulbs are as a basic year-round foundation to our gardens. Starting with snowdrops of winter to the final crocus of autumn, they offer ideas for strong opportunities for color, texture, and design.
Bellamy’s book serves as a guide to planting bulbs throughout the year, so that our gardens will sequentially and seasonally bloom—even if we have long ago forgotten that the bulbs are under the soil just ready to emerge, almost as if by magic! The book presents over 150 bulbs, from common varieties like tulips and daffodils to more unusual ones such as autumn snowflakes or dog’s tooth violets.
Like The Curious Kitchen Gardener discussed above, A Year In Bloom presents its seasonal information, with each of the four chapters featuring expert advice and stunning photography. This is a volume filled with details and covers using bulbs for different garden settings—including borders, containers and naturalized plantings. We even learn about bulbs that have a scent, that attract pollinators, and those that we can reliably count on to bloom every year. Each of these books deserves a prominent home on your gardening buddy’s bookshelf—including your own!