From spring green to winter gold, the drama of grasses is nonstop. There are the striking yellow-and-green ostrich plumes of Zebra Grass. The fine-textured leaves of Blue Oat Grass. Flame Grass's dazzling red-orange leaves, Fountain Grass's coppery brushes, the rich brown nuggets of Northern Sea Oats, the feathery purple haze of Switch Grass.

Whether on their own or as backdrops for colorful garden flowers, ornamental grasses are admired for their color, form, movement, and texture. They also aid in erosion control, soil stabilization, and water retention, making them great conservation tools for gardeners in all hardiness zones. Although grasses are widely available at garden centers all over North America, few books advise the gardener on how to use them in the garden - and especially how to combine them with perennials and other plants. GRASSES features plans and practical advice for more than 24 unique gardens. It's complete with an identification and growing guide to the plants, and it features more than 150 full-color photographs, illustrations, and landscape plans.

The world-famous Chile Pepper Institute is the only organization devoted to the study, cultivation, and enjoyment of the world's favorite fiery fruit, and The Official Cookbook of the Chile Pepper Institute is your guide to cooking with and enjoying chile peppers in all their magnificent, flavorful varieties. With over eighty recipes celebrating the world's diversity of chile peppers and more than a hundred photos of chile peppers in the field, at the market, and on your plate, The Official Cookbook is like a tour through the Institute's famous Teaching Garden. The Official Cookbook is the only book organized to include almost every chile pepper variety worldwide. Each chile includes a description of its history, where it originated and where it is grown now, and its flavor profile, heat index, and common uses. And, of course, recipes!

Succulent plants are easy to grow and design with once you know the basics. And Debra Lee Baldwin, the bestselling author of Designing with Succulents and Succulent Container Gardens, is the ideal guide for gardeners, crafters, and DIYers looking for an introduction to these trendy, low-maintenance plants. Succulents Simplified is a complete primer on choosing, growing and designing with succulents. Along with gorgeous photos packed with design ideas, Debra offers her top 100 plant picks and explains how to grow and care for succulents no matter where you live. Step-by-step projects, including a cake-stand centerpiece, special-occasion bouquets, a vertical garden, and a succulent topiary sphere, will inspire you to express your individual style.Whether you re a novice or veteran, have an acre to fill or a few pots, live in Calexico or Canada, Succulents Simplified is a dazzling primer for success with succulents wherever you live "

Bring trees to life like you've never seen before as The Tree Book invites you on an enchanting and illustrated journey into the astonishingly diverse growth of woodland wildlife in the world around us.

Trees have been a part of human history from the very beginning. Used for shelter, tools, fuel, and food, they also help supply the atmosphere with oxygen and form astonishingly diverse ecosystems, as well as some of the world's most beautiful landscapes. Now the intricate world of leafy woodlands and abundant rainforests is revealed in this extensive visual guide to trees, exploring their key scientific traits and their ecological importance, as well as their enduring significance in human history and culture. From ancient oaks and great redwoods to lush banyans and imposing kapoks, The Tree Book reveals the anatomy, behaviours, and beauty of these incredible plants and habitats in detail.

A must-have volume for budding botanists, this divine nature book showcases the rich diversity of trees, combining bewildering facts about spindles, spruces and more, with dazzling landscape photography of the endless species of trees found in forests and woodland all around the globe.

Explore this fascinating book on trees to discover:

-A historical overview of the cultural influence of trees and their ecological importance
-Striking photography to accompany the profound explanations of tree biology and behaviour
-A clear and comprehensible guide to ecology from both a historical and scientific point of view.

With recent media coverage on climate change highlighting the global importance of our woodlands and rainforests, there's no better time than right now to immerse yourself in this extensive horticultural handbook for an illuminating blend of the science, culture, and history of trees dating back to the beginning of time.

Let DK plant the seed of curiosity with this fantastic forest book, and watch as it blossoms into a life-long love of ecology, proving the ideal gift for naturalists or those with a soft-spot for nature photography. Combining natural history and a scientific overview with a wider look at the history, uses, symbolism, and mythology of trees, this book is a new kind of guide to these fascinating organisms.

Best-selling gardening author Barbara Pleasant makes organic vegetable gardening easy, fun, and rewarding with detailed planting and care designs for 24 beginner-friendly gardens to fit any site, whether it's a tiny side yard, a border, a trellis alongside the house, or a front yard. From exactly what plants (and how many) to buy, where and when to plant them, and how to care for each vegetable throughout the season, Pleasant encourages readers to start small, grow the food they love, and expand their plant selection as their skills develop. Specially tailored plans offer choices to fit a wide range of sites and food preferences, from the Front-Yard Food Supply to the Marinara Medley, Sweet Corn & Company, and High-Value Verticals.There's a plan and plant selection to fit every gardener's passion. Detailed plot plans show progressive stages for how each garden can be expanded gradually over the course of three years, ensuring that beginning gardeners will experience success and satisfaction without being overwhelmed by an over-ambitious plan at the start.

The latest strains of tomato may look perfect, but they often have thick skins and tasteless flesh. Dwarf peas may be the easiest to grow commercially, but many gardeners still grow attractive six-foot types that taste "like peas used to taste." Whatever the benefits of modern hybrids, old varieties still have much to offer, and they are becoming hard to find.Seed saving is a surprisingly simple and hugely satisfying way to propogate your favorite varieties. In this book you will find easy-to-follow, crop by crop guidelines to help you save your own seed.Relevant to the beginner as well as the expert, "Back Garden Seed Saving" tells how and why we should join in the battle to save our irreplaceable vegetable heritage, and the reward--a kitchen full of tasty vegetables.The benefits of saving your own seedSelect plants best suited to your own growing conditionsHelp preserve our shrinking vegetable heritageBreak our dependence on multinational seed companiesSave moneyShare seed with friends, neighbors, and fellow gardener

"Small is Bountiful" covers everything you need to start growing your own food, however small the space available to you. Whether you have never grown anything before or are a seasoned gardener looking for new ideas, you'll find both inspiration and practical tips on planting, harvesting and nurturing. Each chapter takes you through the different stages of how to get the very best from your garden: Big Ideas for Small Spaces looks at the space and site you have available for growing crops. Small Bites offers ideas for planting fast-growing crops such as leafy salads, edible flowers, and herbs, and Bigger Servings explains how to increase the yield of fruiting and root crops. Here you'll find favourites such as potatoes for the patio and a crate of cook's herbs. There is advice on choosing the right plants, planting ideas, and detailed care instructions, plus recipes and tips on how to store and preserve your bountiful harvest. The featured planting has been developed around planting 'recipes', based on how you would use the harvest in the kitchen - for example the container "A Taste of Italy" gives you a marvellous tomato and basil combination. With beautiful photography and clear instructional text, the 34 projects look as good as they taste.

"Hilton Carter's love for plants is infectious... His lush and exuberant displays are inspiring reminders that plants can be so much more than neat little containers on a window sill." Grace Bonney, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Design*Sponge Take a tour through Hilton's own apartment and other lush spaces, filled with a huge array of thriving plants, and learn all you need to know to create your own urban jungle. As the owner of over 200 plants, Hilton feels strongly about the role of plants in one's home - not just for the beauty they add, but for health benefits as well: 'having plants in your home not only adds life, but changes the airflow throughout. It's also a key design element when styling your place. For me, it wasn't about just having greenery, but having the right variety of greenery. I like to see the different textures of foliage all grouped together. You take a fiddle leaf fig and sandwich it between a birds of paradise and a monstera and.... yes!' You will be armed with the know-how you need to care for your plants, where to place them, how to propagate, how to find the right pot, and much more, and most importantly, how to arrange them so that they look their best. Combine sizes and leaf shapes to stunning effect, grow your own succulents from leaf cuttings, create your own air plant display, and more.

Step into Melissa Lo's carefully curated and meticulously maintained world of houseplants. Here, you'll find detailed instructions for keeping your plants healthy, happy and thriving so you can transform your home into a lush, green oasis. With a long standing career as a designer and a passionate hobby as an online houseplant expert, Melissa combines her unique skill set to help you become a successful plant parent, while honing your sense for how to style them in your space. Melissa details the optimal light, water, temperature, substrates and nutrients for the most popular houseplants, in addition to covering the common issues that affect them. With a plethora of information on plant care, you'll get a crash course on how to propagate your specimens, when and how to repot them, what to do about yellowing leaves, how to treat spider mites and fungus gnats and so much more.

Southern Africa is the natural home of the richest and most diverse succulent flora in the world. These plants come in all shapes and sizes, from trees such as the baobab at more than 20 m tall, to miniature soil huggers, just a few millimetres high, which mimic their pebble-desert surroundings.

This user-friendly, richly illustrated field guide features more than 700 southern African succulents, focusing on the most interesting and commonly encountered species. An introduction to families and their key features will help readers identify the relevant plant group, while concise accounts describing the plants’ diagnostic features, along with distribution maps, will enable quick ID of species.

More than just an ID guide for plant lovers, this book will inspire gardeners who are turning to indigenous, low-maintenance and waterwise plants for cultivation.

Early and late grosts, arctic winds, an dinhospitable terrain are just a few of the obstacles facing those who garden in the icebox region of the United States and Canada. Lewis Hill has spent a lifetime in northern Vermont, and is undaunted by the challenges of weather and climate. His system for how to garden more and better in the time that you do have is covered in this extensive 308-page guide.

Cold-Climate Gardening has much information that will prove invaluable to northern gardeners: how to grow food, how to landscape, techniques to employ that will protect vulnerable plantings, how to warm up the soil earlier, and which species are appropriate to your area. Not just for those who live in the snow belt, this book will also be useful to those who garden in microclimates (such as deep valleys or hillsides) or for those who want to extend their gardening season in any climate. Horticulture has deemed it "an immensely useful book, ...written with style, wit, and clarity...." You will garner advice, tips, guidance, and encouragement necessary to have a successful gardening season in spite of Mother Nature's ravages.

How to Grow Winter Vegetables shows that it is possible to enjoy an abundance of vegetables at the darkest time of year, whether stored or ready for harvesting when needed. It also covers growing for the 'hungry gap' from April to early June. Not much grows in winter, but a well-organised plot may nonetheless be quite full. You need to plan carefully, and well ahead (as early as spring) for sowing and planting at specific times through the year, so the main part of the book is an extensive month-by-month sowing, planting and growing calendar. Further sections cover harvesting, from garlic in July right through to the last of the overwintered greens in May, and storing your produce. Many salads can be grown in winter, especially with a little protection from fleece, cloches or larger structures. The book includes a whole section on frost-hardy salad plants, explaining how to ensure harvests of fresh leaves throughout winter. The beauty of winter and its produce is captured in glorious photographs from the author's garden.

Climbing plants constitute a huge, and largely untapped, resource for today's gardeners. Because their habit of growth is primarily vertical, they can be used for utilitarian as well as ornamental purposes: providing privacy, screening eyesores and clothing garden structures, but also furnishing aesthetically pleasing masses of flowers or greenery and drawing the eye upward. In this comprehensive reference, renowned horticulturist Allan Armitage selects and profiles more than 115 of the most useful and attractive climbing plants for a wide range of sites and conditions. Try these climbing plants and add an extra dimension to your garden-literally.

"No Time to Grow?" is an invaluable guide which shows how with good planning, organisation and a little patience, the smallest piece of ground can be worked to make a significant contribution to a healthy diet. The philosophy is always that it is better to give it a go and produce something than not try and to produce nothing. The author sets out to demonstrate ways of working and thinking to enable the production of a relatively large amount of fruit and vegetables with minimal time investment. Using organic principles throughout, the book takes the reader from some general principles of low effort gardening, through clearing the land the easy way, establishing a basic cropping plan, to expanding it and making that plan sustainable. It also includes suggestions on the easiest ways of growing a wide selection of vegetables and fruit. These sections are complemented with a brief review of poultry keeping and a selection of recipes to use some of the garden's produce. "No Time to Grow?" sets out to provide a unique approach to back yard food production viewing the activity as an integrated whole rather than a list of separate crops to produce.

In this classic 1960s gardening book, Margery Fish's advice and enthusiasm for horticulture has stood the test of time and remains a go-to book for green-thumbed gardeners today. She guides the reader through techniques for creating and maintaining a cottage garden with humour and ease, perfect for both beginners and experienced gardeners.In her imaginative adaption of the traditional cottage garden style that she saw disappearing around her, she brought together old-fashioned plants and contemporary plants in the same vein. Today's mixed borders are a direct descendant of the style Margery Fish created at East Lambrook Manor in Somerset, now once again open to the public.Cottage Garden Flowers covers plants that grow easily and naturally in British soil, including easy, adaptable bulbs, perennials and shrubs, such as Astrantia, columbines, daffodils, daisies, Dianthus, foxgloves, hollyhocks, Japonica, old roses, Phlox, Primula, or Virburnum. No longer in danger of being forgotten, these traditional flowering plants have now res-established their place at the heart of garden design. Graham Rice, the widely published gardening author and the former London Evening Standard gardening correspondent, has reviewed the plant names in the original text, providing a plant name section at the back of the book. This allows readers to identify current plants from the old Latin names within the text.

In Uplift Cinema, Allyson Nadia Field recovers the significant yet forgotten legacy of African American filmmaking in the 1910s. Like the racial uplift project, this cinema emphasized economic self-sufficiency, education, and respectability as the keys to African American progress. Field discusses films made at the Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes to promote education, as well as the controversial The New Era, which was an antiracist response to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. She also shows how Black filmmakers in New York and Chicago engaged with uplift through the promotion of Black modernity. Uplift cinema developed not just as a response to onscreen racism, but constituted an original engagement with the new medium that has had a deep and lasting significance for African American cinema. Although none of these films survived, Field's examination of archival film ephemera presents a method for studying lost films that opens up new frontiers for exploring early film culture.

Discover how to keep your garden in the best of health. Ideal for first-time gardeners, Grow Pests & Diseases contains everything you need to know to prevent and treat a wide range of plant pests, diseases, disorders, and more. Far more than a simple list of treatments, this book shows you how to keep plants in top condition, recognise the signs of ill-health, and decide whether or not intervention is needed, while the fully illustrated ailment directory is organised by symptom and plant type for quick and easy identification. Packed with practical, jargon-free know-how, this easy-to-use guide has everything you need to know to help your garden Grow.

This handy pocket guide introduces local gardening enthusiasts to some of southern Africa’s most beautiful, beneficial and easy- to-care-for indigenous plants, giving guidance on how best to use them and how to ensure that they flourish.

It offers:

• A selection of 145 garden-friendly, low-maintenance trees, shrubs and bedding plants perfectly adapted to our local soils and weather conditions
• Text that’s direct and simple
• Full-colour photographs that show plant details and ‘in context’ planting
• Icons indicating at a glance whether a species is evergreen or deciduous, frost-hardy, suitable for a sunny or shaded position, fast or slow-growing, water wise, fragrant and attractive to insects or birds.

An essential handbook for easy-care beautiful gardening.

The author, Glenice Ebedes, is the owner of Grounded Landscaping. She is a graduate of Lifestyle College and an active member of the Guild of Landscape Designers. She specializes in indigenous, wildlife-friendly gardens and her gardens regularly feature in magazines.

This book uses delightful examples to demonstrate that flowers, roses, shrubs and climbers, grasses and ferns are simply the gardener's version of the painter's palette. The impressive collection of ideas as to how to plant a garden range from the playfully charming through the formally severe to the frothily opulent. It is, of course, essential to make the correct choice and combine plants according to their dominance and height, their shape, colour and flowering season if they are to develop their full charm and thrive well. This book describes with beautiful photographs, how dreams in bloom can come true and that there is room for them in even the smallest of gardens.

This is a story of gardens and how people can grow well in them. Through a lifetime's experience of award-winning work in community gardens and in mental health care and training, Cameron shows us how tending green spaces can bring tremendous benefits to mental health. Using the garden's annual cycle, she reveals how stages of the growing year can act as a powerful metaphor and even mirror healing mechanisms that can help in times of distress, anxiety or depression. By exploring practices used in therapeutic and community garden settings we learn techniques that can be applied whatever your circumstances. The Garden Cure is full of ideas and tools that will help support your own and others' physical and mental well-being, especially when life is challenging. How, in other words, gardening helps us all grow and thrive.

This encyclopaedia features the most beautiful blooms from around the world, including annuals and perennials, trees, orchids, shrubs, ground covers, bromeliads, and bulbs.

There is a fantastic array of vegetables you can grow in your garden, and not all of them are annuals. In "Perennial Vegetables" the adventurous gardener will find information, tips, and sound advice on less common edibles that will make any garden a perpetual, low-maintenance source of food.
Imagine growing vegetables that require just about the same amount of care as the flowers in your perennial beds and borders--no annual tilling and potting and planting. They thrive and produce abundant and nutritious crops throughout the season. It sounds too good to be true, but in "Perennial Vegetables" author and plant specialist Eric Toensmeier ("Edible Forest Gardens") introduces gardeners to a world of little-known and wholly underappreciated plants. Ranging beyond the usual suspects (asparagus, rhubarb, and artichoke) to include such "minor" crops as ground cherry and ramps (both of which have found their way onto exclusive restaurant menus) and the much sought after, anti-oxidant-rich wolfberry (also known as goji berries), Toensmeier explains how to raise, tend, harvest, and cook with plants that yield great crops and satisfaction.
Perennial vegetables are perfect as part of an edible landscape plan or permaculture garden. Profiling more than 100 species, illustrated with dozens of color photographs and illustrations, and filled with valuable growing tips, recipes, and resources, "Perennial Vegetables" is a groundbreaking and ground-healing book that will open the eyes of gardeners everywhere to the exciting world of edible perennials.

Contents:
Introduction
Part One - The Seeds of Time
The Hunter-Gatherers
The Origins and Spread of Agriculture
Part Two - The Migration of Plants
Gathering Food from the Wild
Grains
Roots and Tubers
Fruits
Herbs and Vegetables
Nuts and Seeds
Spices
Caffeine and Alcohol
Hallucinogens
Medicines
Fragrant Plants
Ornamentals
Fibre and Dyes
Wood
Other Uses of Plants
Part Three - Today and Tomorrow
The Industrial Age
Invasives
Evolution and Biodiversity of Crops
Conservation of Wild Plants
Chronology
Glossary
Index