What would a greengrocer say if you were to ask for half a dozen Grenadiers and a couple of Catsheads? In the course of the past century we have lost much of our rich heritage of orchard fruits, but with taste once again triumphing over shelf-life and a renewed interest in local varieties, we are rediscovering the delights of that most delicious and adaptable fruit: the apple. This book features apples from the Herefordshire Pomona that are still cultivated today. The Pomona - an exquisitely illustrated book of apples and pears - was published at the height of the Victorian era by a small rural naturalists' club. Its beautiful illustrations and authoritative text are treasured by book collectors and apple experts alike. From the familiar Blenheim Orange and Worcester Pearmain to the less feted yet scrumptious Ribston Pippin, Margil and Pitmaston Pine Apple, Heritage Apples is illustrated with the Pomona's stunning paintings and tells the intriguing stories behind each variety, how they acquired their names, and their merits for eating, cooking or making cider. Also including practical advice on how to choose and grow your own trees, this is the perfect book for apple-lovers and growers.

"Bursting with useful advice, especially for new gardeners." --Booklist To be a successful gardener, you need to know two things: how to do something and when to do it. Both concepts are thoroughly tackled in The Month-By-Month Gardening Guide. This comprehensive approach to gardening guides home gardeners--whether you are growing vegetables, flowers, or houseplants--through a year of growing. Throughout, the emphasis is on organic, wildlife-friendly techniques. By following the guidance detailed in this hardworking primer, you'll be well on your way to a beautiful and bountiful garden that will provide pleasure throughout the year.

Jane’s Delicious A–Z of Vegetables is an accessible guide to the most commonly-grown vegetables, plus many new and unusual ones now available, with detailed information on how to sow, plant, feed, water, protect, harvest and eat them, as well as save their seed for future generations. Written in Jane’s quirky, practical style and lavishly illustrated with full-colour photographs for easy reference, this is a one-stop guide to growing any type of vegetable organically.

Have you ever had a question on how to grow African violets but could not find the answer? Now your dilemma is solved and you will be able to quickly find the information for which you are looking. With this book in your hands you will no longer have to guess when it comes to growing beautiful African violets, crowned with dozens of gorgeous blossoms. The primary theme of Mel Robey's third book on African violets is: Getting Back to the Basics. The reader will find answers to 250 of the most common questions the author has been asked since the publication of his first book on these popular houseplants. He combines a unique knowledge of horticulture with an easy to understand writing style. 250 Questions and their answers are covered in ten chapters Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Getting To Know Your Plants Chapter 3 Plant Food Essential For Healthy Plants Chapter 4 Potting Mixtures: Key To Being Successful Chapter 5 Containers For Growing Beautiful African Violets Chapter 6 Proper Watering Techniques Important Chapter 7 Those Ugly Pests: Insects, Diseases, and Other Unsightly Problems Chapter 8 Propagation Is Easy Chapter 9 The Environment Around Your Plants Chapter 10 Light: Its Role In A Plant's Life Glossary You will find answers to questions such as: .What can be done to solve the problem after a white, salty crust has formed on the potting soil surface and rim of the pot? .Does the type of fertilizer I use have any influence on how well my African violets bloom? .Are there any simple ways to sterilize my potting mixture? .If you could pick one problem that causes African violets the most trouble, what would it be? .Why are the flower buds on my African violet dropping off before they open? This is very discouraging

Martin Crawford is an internationally acknowledged expert on growing perennial food systems. It features a selection of the 100 best trees to grow. It includes appendices with lists of suitable trees for specific situations. Martin Crawford has researched and experimented with tree crops for 25 years and has selected over 100 of the best trees producing fruits, nuts, edible leaves and other useful products that can be grown in Europe and North America. The appendices makes choosing trees for your situation easy, with lists of suitable trees for specific situations plus flow charts to guide you. If you want to know about and use the large diversity of tree crops that are available in temperate and continental climates, then this book is both fascinating and essential reading by an internationally acknowledged expert.

This beautifully illustrated guide shows a distinguished plantsman-photographer's personal favorites for every season and garden use.Published at $17.95 Available Now at $8.98

No room to garden outside? No problem! A complete guide filled with a host of valuable information and DIY projects, Ultimate Guide to Indoor Gardening shares all the knowledge on how to grow a variety of foods inside your home. From growing vegetables, microgreens, and herbs to hydroponic gardening, troubleshooting, and more, learn to grow fresh produce all year-round, no matter where you live. With expert tips on composting, working with grow lights, choosing a growing locale, container gardening for both root and above ground vegetables, the basics of fermentation, and so much more, this must-have resource is a one-stop shop on everything you need to know about successful indoor food production and how to maximize your indoor space!

Do you share your garden with a car? Worried that your neighbour's trees are blocking your light? Is your garden too big? Too small? An awkward shape? Or maybe you just don't know where to begin... Whether you are grappling with a particular dilemma or just need some inspiration, this guide leads the way forward with sharp design advice and beautiful images. Read this book and the prospect of tackling your own garden will seem suddenly less daunting and more fun.

A highly original study of eccentric English garden-makers and their extraordinary gardens In English Garden Eccentrics, renowned landscape architect and historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan reveals a series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created at his home at Denbies one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves, and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens in a way that was often thought excessive. With quirky and compelling illustrations and chapters including "Lady Broughton's 'Miniature copy of the Swiss Glaciers,'" "Topiary on a Gargantuan Scale: The Clipped 'Yew-trees' at Four Ancient London Churchyards," and "The Burrowing Duke at Harcourt House," English Garden Eccentrics brings together garden and landscape history with cultural history and biography. The book engagingly reveals what it is about the gardener and his or her creation that can be seen as eccentric and focusses on an area of garden history that has scarcely been explored: gardens seen as expressions of the singular character of their makers, and therefore functioning, in effect, as a form of autobiography. This lively and accessible book calls on gardeners today to learn from example and dare to be eccentric. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Grow amazing plants from the comfort of your own home.

This book will teach you the basics of growing fruit, vegetables, herbs, and the very best indoor flowers, as well as tips and tricks to reuse your food scraps and reduce your waste as you experiment with seeds.

Did you know that you can grow a beautiful houseplant from an avocado seed? Or regrow lettuce in a matter of weeks, just in an inch of water? And you can create a windowsill of delicious herbs simply from cuttings?

You don't need a complicated toolkit to start sowing; just spades of enthusiasm and any spare containers you have lying around your home. And here's the best part: as your windowsills begin to burst with greenery, you will reap the health benefits too - from anti-oxidants to air purifiers, as well as plants which aid good sleep, your plants will transform every aspect of your lifestyle.

This gorgeous book celebrates the joy of creating something from scratch and infusing the home-grown mentality into all aspects of your lifestyle, from your mealtimes to your home d�cor and your wellbeing. So, just pick up a pot and start sowing your own!

As a reformatted edition, this beautifully illustrated book provides an inspirational and practical introduction to the traditions of Japanese Zen gardens, using natural materials such as wood, bamboo, rocks and pebbles. Emphasizing the value of shape in trees and shrubs with the subtlety of colour through the varied greens of foliage and moss, Serene Gardens is the only book that explains how western plants and materials can be used to achieve the natural, minimalist look so beloved by Japanese garden designers.There are instructions and tips for selecting plants and materials which are readily available, as well as plant lists and climate zone maps to aid western gardeners. As the wealth of stunning colour photographs from around the world demonstrates, Japanese garden design is concerned with a reverence for nature and the overall effect is of tranquility. Serene Gardens will help people to create much-needed oases of calm in their own outdoor spaces.

Forest Gardening (or agroforestry) is a way of growing edible crops with nature doing most of the work. A forest garden imitates young natural woodland, with a wide range of crops grown in vertical layers. Species are chosen for their beneficial effects on each other, creating a healthy system that maintains its own fertility, with little need for digging, weeding or pest control. The result of this largely perennial planting is a tranquil, beautiful and productive space. This book is a bible for permaculture and forest gardening, with practical advice on how to create a forest garden, from planning and design to planting and maintenance. It explains how a forest garden is designed from the top down: the canopy layer first, then the shrub layer, the perennial ground-cover layer, the annuals & biennials next, the climbers and nitrogen fixers and finally the clearings, living spaces and paths. Whether in a small back garden or in a larger plot, the environmental benefits of growing this way are great. Forest Gardens are a viable solution to the challenge of a changing climate: we can grow food sustainably in them without compromising soil health, food quality or biodiversity. Forest gardens: store carbon dioxide in the soil and in the woody biomass of the trees and shrubs. enable the soil to store more water after heavy rains, minimizing flooding and erosion. boost the health of the ecosystem, ensuring a balance of predators and beneficial insects because mixed planting is crucial to the scheme. allows the soil to thrive because it is covered with plants all year round. Creating a Forest Garden includes a detailed directory of over 500 trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, annuals, root crops and climbers. As well as more familiar plants such as fig and apple trees, blackcurrants and rosemary shrubs, you can grow your own chokeberries, goji berries, yams, heartnuts, bamboo shoots and buffalo currants. Forest gardens produce fruits, nuts, vegetables, seeds, salads, herbs, spices, firewood, mushrooms, medicinal herbs, dye plants, soap plants, and honey from bees. This book tells you everything you need to create your own forest garden with beautiful illustrations and helpful tips throughout.

With more than 1,000 images and descriptive texts, this is the ultimate celebration of the world's most gorgeous gardens This internationally bestselling inspirational resource for garden-lovers and designers is now reissued with a gorgeous new cover - bringing the book's winning blend of authority and visual appeal to a new audience. The Gardener's Garden spans seven centuries to spotlight more than 250 of the globe's finest permanent gardens by leading garden designers, horticulturalists, and landscape architects, as chosen by an international team of experts. Gardens of all types and style from across the globe, from the grandeur of Versailles to a private sanctuary in Marrakech, have been brought to life through more than 1,000 sumptuous photographs and detailed descriptive texts by leading garden writers. This is both a valuable resource for those seeking inspiration on garden design and planting and the ideal gift for garden-lovers everywhere.

The worldwide trend towards smaller houses and spaces and apartment type homes has inspired and demanded a new approach in gardening. This is due predominantly to the freedom of expression in the styling and use of outdoor spaces, the approach to hard landscaping and the use of plant material most suited to the environment, house or garden design and style.

The trend is to introduce hard landscaping and plant material natural to the local area, gravel as a substitute for lawn in small spaces, a sense of fun and the unexpected in the use of plants or accessories. This is what makes gardening a pleasure and one of the finest creative arts there is.

Keith Kirsten, world-renowned horticulturist, shares his vast local and international experience and knowledge with his readers in this book on small gardens – from the initial design, the preparation, the hard landscaping elements, container gardening, water, maintenance, garden chores for every month of the year, food and herb gardening, to lists of plants suitable for smaller spaces.

Breathtakingly beautiful photos not only illustrate the information, but are artworks in their own right providing a pool of inspirational ideas.

The outstanding social and ecological roles of urban forests in the growth of cities has become widely known. In many parts of the world, despite or even because of continuing suburbanization, initiatives are being put forth to preserve urban forests, to develop them further and to make them acc- sible to the public. This volume focuses on a particular component of the urban forest - trix urban wild woodlands. We understand these to be stands of woody plants, within the impact area of cities, whose form is characterized by trees and in which a large leeway for natural processes makes possible a convergence toward wilderness. The wilderness character of these urban woodlands can vary greatly. We differentiate between two kinds of w- derness. The old wilderness is the traditional one; it may return slowly to woodland areas when forestry use has been abandoned. The enhancement of wilderness is a task already demanded of urban and peri-urban forestry in many places. This book would like to direct the attention of the reader to a second kind of wilderness, which we call new wilderness. This arises on heavily altered urban-industrial areas where abandonment of use makes such change possible. The wild nature of urban abandoned areas was discovered in the 1970s through urban-ecological research. Since then, in a very short time, profound structural changes in industrial countries have led to h- dreds or thousands of hectares in urbanized areas becoming available for natural colonization processes."

This guide from the experts of Kew Royal Botanical Gardens is filled with tips and advice to help you grow your best vegetable garden ever! In this book Kew's Kitchen Gardener, Helena Dove, combines practical elements with inspiration and beauty to make a comprehensive and informative guide with all you need to know to master theart of growing vegetables. She shows how to grow some of the most popular staple crops such as tomatoes, potatoes, radishes and rocket, and also some more unusual and exciting choices such as oca, tomatillo, seakale and yacon. She gives easy to follow instructions on how to be a successful vegetable gardener, plus 12 exciting projects to try throughout the year including forcing rhubarb, creating an asparagus border and growing in raised beds. From sowing, to planting young plants, to hardening off and harvesting, find out what you need to do and when, to produce the most magnificent harvests. All the advice is underpinned by the expertise and authority of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and illustrated from Kew's world-famous botanical collection. With this book, you wil be able to reap a rich bounty of delicious vegetables from just a few packets of seed and some fertile ground! This book is from the Kew Experts series, in which the top gardeners and botanical scientists from Royal Botanic Kew Gardens offer up advice and information as well as suggesting handy projects on a range of gardening topics. Other titles include: Companion to Medicinal Plants, Guide to Growing Bulbs, Guide to Growing Fruit, Guide to Growing Orchids, Guide to Growing Roses, Guide to Growing Succulents and Cacti, Guide to Growing Trees, Guide to Growing Herbs and Guide to Growing House Plants.