More Books

Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime

Winter flowers in greenhouse and sun-heated pit

The New Organic Grower: Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener

The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses

Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place

Relating Architecture to Landscape

The Experience of Landscape

Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses

Why We Garden

From Our House to Bauhaus

Frankly, I think Tom Wolfe could write about factories that produce brown paper bags and he’d spin a good yarn out of it (except maybe, for A Man in Full). The Bonfire of the Vanities is a must-read for anyone, but especially for those of us who have lived in New York and have been witness to more than one local political scandal.

Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building

But despite this and despite the fact that I work in the field of design, I had never read From Bauhaus to Our Houseuntil recently. And that’s a shame, because it’s a great read.

Wolfe chronicles the advent of modernism, starting with Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus School for architects. From there he illustrates the fevered admiration of the rest of the world’s architectural community, until the point that defining yourself as an architect is barely less specific than labeling yourself a modernist. He touches on the absurdity that some of the most renowned modern architects are the ones that build the least. Finally, he observes the backlash towards this style - starting with Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas.

Gordon Bunshaft+SOM's Lever House

If you are even tangentially connected to architecture or design, I’d recommend this -- it’s a light, fast, breezy book that somehow still manages to provide academic information and discuss seemingly lofty concepts.

Book Review: Shade Gardening

A former student wrote me yesterday, mentioning my post about plants for beachy locations, and asked me if I could recommend a few books for shade gardening. I can.

I really like Ken Druse's Natural Shade Garden because it includes actual information about shade-loving plants in addition to images and discussion of good plant combinations. The photos are enchanting and plants are named in the captions.

Similar to the Druse book is Keith Wiley's Shade. This is a slightly slimmer book, and though I prefer the images in the Druse book, Shade has a great glossary of plants in the back for easy reference.

Both the above books draw inspiration from woodlands - as the plants that naturally occur in woodlands are tolerant of shade. And of course, woodlands (or most of them) are only really in shade after the canopy leafs out and until the leaves fall in autumn. A great book on woodland plants is Beth Chatto's Shade Garden.

Book Review

Last night I went to the Strand to see David Allen Sibley speak about his new field guide to trees. I have to say, as far as field guides go, this is worth purchasing.

Sibley of course is most known for his bird field guides, The Sibley Guide to Birds and The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America. His hand-painted renderings of birds are beautiful and in many ways more evocative of the actual bird than photos.

Equally so, his renderings of almost 700 tree species are lovely. But what I liked most about this book -- what compelled me to buy it, even though I have dozens of books about trees -- is that it is arranged taxonomically and by plant family. I often rely on plant family characteristics to narrow down the list of possibilities when I am confronted with a plant I can't identify and though that's a sophisticated approach for a novice, it's ultimately an inevitable strategy for any plant lover. Yet so few books are arranged by family.

The book is not perfect, of course. To me, it could be twice as big but I suppose field guides, by definition, should be limited to a certain size. But I did miss some of the more personal information and opinions about various plants that make the Dirr book so necessary. With most of the plant books I own, there's an obvious love -- or even obsession -- about plants evident in the writing and I don't get that impression from the Sibley guide. Still, the arrangement by plant family made it a must-buy.

Sweetbay Magnolia

Not far from yesterday’s sawtooth oak in central park stands another diminutive beauty (and this one isn’t even invasive!), the sweetbay magnolia, or Magnolia virginiana.

Magnolia virginiana is more Elinor Dashwood than Marianne -- the two sisters from Jane Austin's Sense and Sensibility. It’s the less outrageous counterpart to Magnolia soulangiana. The white flowers are smaller and they never cast a profusion of blossoms over the entire tree, like the floral frenzy of the saucer magnolia in early spring.

But, while you don’t have a riot of color and perfume when sweetbay magnolia is in season, you do have a slow burn. Sweetbay magnolia sets a steady pace that means it will bloom for months in the summer, as opposed to the ephemeral display of the saucer magnolia. This is demonstrated in the above photo and the following two. Above, you see a flower bud and below, a flower that is just about to open.

In tandem with buds forming and opening, you have fully-open blossoms like the one below. The flowers are creamy-white, similiar to Magnolia stellata, perhaps, but less strappy and flimsy. They are lovely flowers -- and fragrant, too -- but you need to get a bit closer to this plant to appreciate its beauty. Much like Elinor.

With the beach in mind...

I've been asked by students and friends what books are good for inspiration on beachside gardening.

Plants that thrive on the sea are hard to come by. For one thing, you have high winds and a lot of salt in the air. Additionally, since most people are at the beach in the summer, you want to plant something that blooms around that time.

Here are a couple books that I think are good sources for beachside landscape design:

I've never worked at a residential office that practices in the Hamptons and doesn't have Seaside Gardening on the bookshelves. It's a pretty accessible and easy-to-use resource.

If you are working on gardens further south, say in Florida, this Gardens by the Sea: Creating a Tropical Paradise is an economical choice.

And finally, you have good old Taylors: Taylor's Guide to Seashore Gardening: From the Atlantic to the Pacific, the Best Plants to Grow on Every Coast (Taylor's Gardening Guides).

Enjoy the warmer summer weather (if it finally stays here with us!).

Yet Another Book

As Memorial Day weekend is coming up, this seemed to make an apropos book recommendation:

Kelly Klein's Pools

We're ordering it at my office right now as, over the years, we've heard nothing but good things about it. There are seemingly limitless choices in books on pool design, but the photos in this are luscious and some of the properties that are showcased are hard to find in other publications.

Book Review

If you're a regular reader, you may notice that I'm trying to get a bit more elaborate with my tags for posts. I've added 'medicinal plants' and 'edible plants' and a bit on etymology, which is clearly a favorite of mine.

Lately though, I've also discussed plant form in greater detail. Yesterday's post mentioned nectar spurs and we've covered bracts more than once.

You can get a fair amount of information online about plant morphology, but I have recently fallen in love with this book, Plant Form: An Illustrated Guide to Flowering Plant Morphology. It's an accessible read and, at the same time, it's an incredible resource for detailed, scientific information. If you have even a passing interest in morphology, I'd definitely recommend it.

Another great book

Lately, I've been referring to this book quite a bit for research on a project in a Mediterranean climate: The Dry Gardening Handbook: Plants and Practices for a Changing Climate

It's a terrific resource, with concise, easy-to-find information on various plants for xeriscaping. What I like best is he applies a drought tolerance key for each plant. 1 means that the plants can sustain without irrigation for 1 month, 2 for 2 months, etc.

Nandina domestica

Nandina domestica, unfortunately, has gorgeous fall color this time of year:


I say it's unfortunate because in the past ten years or so it's become apparent that this plant is fairly invasive in the southeast US. I suppose it is not a total surprise, as this plant is in the Berberidaceae family, which also includes Berberis thunbergii, the Japanese barberry, which is also highly invasive.



When I teach students about invasive plants like barberry and nandina, I try to instill some sense of responsibility in them. While I personally am not outraged by the use of these plants in intensely urban conditions (where they will have a very hard time finding nearby woods to invade), one should seriously consider alternatives when they live in suburban or rural areas, as no doubt such species will misplace the native herbaceous and shrub layer of forests and meadows.

The plant above is growing in my parents place in Virginia. They have a wooded lot, so while we haven't removed it, we do check out the woods and remove any would-be conquerers.

Many feel that native plants should be exclusively used in order to prevent invasion of plants like nandina and barberry into nearby natural habitats. It's an ongoing debate. While I avoid using invasive plants, I don't eschew all exotic species, though some may consider it more politically correct.

I've begun reading the Robert Sullivan book, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. Coincidentally enough, last night I read an interesting description of the native/non-native debate in a footnote I've copied below. It doesn't address the subtle, vital difference between non-native and invasive, but it did include some new information:

The term native when used in regards to plants and animals can be complicated. In an essay entitled "The Mania for Native Plants in Nazi Germany," published in a collection called Concrete Jungle, Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, the director of Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington , D.C., says, "The missionary zeal with which so-called foreign plants are condemned as aggressive is significant. Such characterizations do not contribute to a rational discussion about the future development of our natural and cultural environment, but possibly promote xenophobia." Wolschke-Bulmahn points out that some plants that are considered "native" to the United States may have been carried over from Siberia by people migrating to American over a land bridge, and he writes of an early proponent of native plants, Jens Jensen, a landscape architect who lived in Wisconsin who advocated the destruction of "foreign" plants, especially "Latin" or "Oriental" plants. Jensen had close ties to Nazi landscape architects in Germany. In a journal, Jensen wrote: "The gardens I have created myself...shall express a spirit of American and therefore shall be free of foreign character as far as possible." In 1938, Rudolph Borchardt, a Jewish writer persecuted by the Nazis, wrote this of native plant advocates like Jensen: "If this kind of garden-owning barbarian became the rule, then neither a gillyflower nor a rosemary, neither a peach-tree nor a myrtle sapling nor a tea-rose would ever have crossed the Alps. Gardens connect people, time and latitudes...The garden of humanity is a huge democracy. It is not the only democracy which such clumsy advocates threaten to dehumanize."

The book, by the way, is a terrific read, not only full of fascinating, at times squeamish, information about rats but also about New York City history. It reads very easily, too.

Book Recommendation

I am quickly making my way through a pretty diverting read, Common to This Country: Botanical Discoveries of Lewis and Clark.


It is a fast, easy read that tracks Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's expedition west, commissioned with the task to find the northwest passage.

While Clark was primarily responsible for creating maps that documented their travels (beginning in St. Louis, heading west through the Dakotas, then past the Continental Divide, finally reaching the Pacific Coast via the Columbia River, near modern-day Oregon), Lewis clearly was the one who had an eye and passion for plants.

Each chapter is about a plant they discovered and features information on their expedition, hardships and survival skills. Finally, there is a coda about the plant's modern-day use.

This is not a book for one to necessarily learn new plants - it is scant on identifying characteristics - and the illustrations, though beautiful, are not technically detailed. However, I'm finding it a good addition to my plant library. Like one of my favorite out-of-print books, The Folklore of Trees and Shrubs, this is a great resource for some anecdotal information on plant species.