Authors are well versed in life with plants
These summer books will provide inspirational reading about rural and urban gardening
Dig into these gorgeous books for gardening inspiration. As Adrian Higgins of The Washington Post writes, these authors and photographers capture the sights and sounds of the natural world.
A Tapestry Garden: The Art of Weaving Plants and Place By Marietta and Ernie O’Byrne Timber. 263 pp. $50
A garden needs time, skill and toil to become something. To become great, it also requires passion. All of these elements have come together in the Eugene, Ore., garden of Marietta and Ernie O’Byrne. You might add imagination to the mix. If you are horticulturally savvy, the image of a woodland mayapple growing in a pot with coleus may be the most mind-blowing. In this simple pairing, the rules of grouping plants by their ilk are thrown out the window.
The O’Byrnes have built a garden that is regarded as one of the best in the country in its horticultural sophistication, variety and richness. Thumbing through these pages (with great photos by the authors and photographer Doreen Wynja), you see that this is a feat achieved from knowledge gathered during each growing season. An opera singer is judged by one appearance at a time, a great gardener by the sum of all his or her performances.
What became Northwest Garden Nursery started for Marietta O’Byrne as a rundown, 70-acre (28-hectare) farm in the 1970s. The couple later ran a landscaping business as they developed their garden. In time, they couldn’t bear to leave it each day, so they used it as a base for their wholesale nursery specializing in the perennial plant named the hellebore.
The landscape now features such treasures as a rock garden, a shade garden, perennial borders, a chaparral garden, a vegetable garden and more.
From her kitchen window, Marietta surveys a Mount Fuji flowering cherry tree whose horizontal branches form sheltering arms 40 feet (12.2 metres) across. “I planted it in 1973 as a fragile stick with spindly arms,” she writes, “little imagining how wide it would spread and how many shrubs and ground covers would thrive under its umbrella.”
City Green: Public Gardens of New York By Jane Garmey. Photographs by Mick Hales. Monacelli. 224 pp. $66
Today, New York’s Central Park on a balmy Saturday is a picture of thousands of city dwellers walking, jogging, picnicking and generally being in love with urban life. It must be everything its 19th-century creators, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, had wanted. But their underlying idea, that green spaces could elevate a city and its inhabitants, became lost. Just a few years ago, New York was a study in the effects of environmental decline on social degradation, and vice versa. Many parts of the city were dirty, trash-filled, unpleasant and even dangerous. New York’s revival, while bringing other social ills, is something to celebrate. People see the crowds, the skyscrapers, the development as the physical manifestations of the revival. What isn’t so well-perceived is how New York’s green spaces — the city’s parks and gardens — have been essential to this renaissance.
Garden writer Jane Garmey and photographer Mick Hales remedy this in their survey of 25 gardens that have been created or revived over the past generation.
Some need little introduction — the High Line, the Conservatory Garden in Central Park — but others are hidden gems. The three-acre (1.2-hectare) Heather Garden at Fort Tryon Park is a spectacle of shrubs, perennials and bulbs along with heathers and heaths that bring echoes of the Scottish Highlands to the Hudson.
A chapter on a business that has built organic farms on rooftops in Queens and Brooklyn brings home the can-do spirit and optimism of young urban farmers. At its two sites, Brooklyn Grange produces more than 50,000 pounds (22,680 kilograms) of produce annually.
As Garmey writes: “The ever-growing appreciation of New York’s parks and gardens tells a story of how green has triumphed over tarmac and plants over weeds.”