Relax in your garden with a good book. Here are recommendations for gardening and nature books.
The dog days of August are a great time to sit in the shade with a good book and a cold drink. Here are some recommendations for books related to gardens and nature.
Tree Day: A Story of 24 Hours and 24 Arboreal Lives
by Meg Lowman, illustrated by Thibaud Hérem
An hourly guide that spotlights twenty-four trees as they root, flower and host diverse forest life.
In this short book, treetop explorer Meg Lowman guides us through a global forest. Each chapter of Tree Day introduces a single tree during a single hour, highlighting 24 species from around the world.
From the dragon’s blood tree in Yemen to the coastal redwood in the Pacific Northwest, from the sugar maple in New England to the chocolate tree in Mexico, Lowman spotlights the trees as they root, flower and host diverse forest life. By the end of the tree day, we will understand that trees are the silent caretakers of our planet. Celebrated artist Thibaud Hérem depicts each tree with gorgeous pen and ink illustrations.
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
by Camille T. Dungy
A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment. National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.
In Soil, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the primarily white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When moving there in 2013 with her husband and daughter, she encountered strict rules about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.
As a response to the homogenous policies, Dungy turns the various plants, herbs, vegetables and flowers in her garden into both metaphor and argument. She shows how sameness can limit the future of the planet, and why more diverse language in environmental conversations is essential to protecting it. “Soil is a powerful, painful, and beautiful book about the complicated history of Black Americans and the land,” said JoAnn Hart in EcoLit Books.
How Flowers Made Our World
“A work of real passion.”—The New York Times
“A seamless melding of poetry and science.”—Wall Street Journal
Flowers didn’t just decorate the world. They made it.
Flowers may look like pretty ornaments, but they’ve shaped the world in profound ways. In How Flowers Made Our World, David George Haskell explores familiar blooms like magnolias, orchids and roses, as well as fascinating but less known flowers like seagrasses and tea, to show how flowers transformed nature, helped create ecosystems and made human life possible.
Flowers reinvented plant reproduction, bringing male and female together in the same flower and amply provisioning seeds and fruits. These innovations feed legions of animals, including ourselves. They helped build and sustain rainforests, savannahs, prairies and even ocean shores.
In the face of rapid environmental change, flowers offer us lessons on resilience and creative adaptation. We need floral creativity, beauty and joy more than ever. How Flowers Made Our World combines lyrical writing, sensual exploration and cutting-edge science to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.
The Gardener’s Mindset: Connecting with Nature Through Plants
From Stephen Orr, former editor-in-chief of Better Homes and Gardens, comes a collection of essays and photographs that explores the restorative power of gardening, while sharing his own challenges in the garden and practical advice for growing plants and vegetables at home.
“The road to great gardening is littered with dead plants.”
Stephen Orr has spent much of his decades-long career writing about gardening, and now, in The Gardener’s Mindset, he helps readers to understand not just how to garden but how to think about it. Inspired by the classic garden essays of writers such as Vita Sackville-West, Elizabeth Lawrence and Henry Mitchell, Orr offers reflections and practical advice for gardeners everywhere, no matter their skill level.
With gorgeous photographs and easy projects, from creating a color scheme to building a wildlife habitat, Orr also traces his personal gardening journey through the many gardens he and his husband have cultivated over the years. From his first garden on a New York City rooftop to his current garden in Cape Cod, he reflects on the plants, lessons and skills that have shaped his experience. These pages capture the emotional well-being that gardeners experience when digging in the dirt: connecting with nature while entering a state of creative flow.
