Plants make great pets - they're quiet, decorative, housetrained and (mostly) low-maintenance - and with this helpful guide, you'll soon be the perfect plant parent! Grow Your Own Pet Plants has all the information you'll need for green-thumbed success, from learning which plant to take home to how to help your leafy friend thrive in all conditions. Andrew Mikolajski provides helpful tips, from how to nurse and propagate cuttings to choosing a plant which suits your home and lifestyle. With a simple guide to more than 40 plant personalities and easy care advice, from feeding and grooming to showing off your new pet to guests, you'll soon be the proud owner of a new collections of plant pets.

The Vermont Gardener's Companion tells how to get the most out of Vermont's short gardening season and details how readers can use organic methods to improve soil, deal with diseases and pests, and get better results with their plants in a state where "winter temperatures plunge far below zero and rocks left by the glaciers pop out of the ground each spring like bread from hyperactive toasters." With good humor and a natural teacher's gift for explanations, Henry Homeyer makes gardening fun and readily accessible to all.

To create a garden that gives pleasure throughout the year is the goal of every garden-maker. The greatest designers maintain that it is the garden in winter that sets the scene for the remainder of the year. Designing and Creating a Winter Garden takes the reader through the process of designing a new garden from scratch or re-working an existing garden, with winter as the key, formative season. The first part of the book deals with design considerations and ideas, including: assessing the site and its opportunities and constraints; designing the basic framework for winter; making use of low, winter light and using sparkling colour; pots, containers and statuary in the garden, and finally the maintenance of the garden in winter. The second part comprises a detailed catalogue of suggested plants and their uses, grouped into: evergreens; winter-flowering trees, shrubs and perennials, including those that are strongly scented; shrubs with coloured and textured bark and finally, unusual, striking plants to use as focal points. This book sets out to inspire both garden designers and enthusiastic gardeners to create a garden that is as captivating in winter as it is during the remainder of the year.

Written by commercial-scale grower Mel Thomas, "Cannabis Cultivation" divulges the expertise, tips, and insight he learned at the helm of one of the world's largest marijuana growing operations. Ideal for beginners and anyone interested in learning more about growing marijuana indoors, the book is free of technical jargon and boring theory, and its step-by-step directions enable anyone to grow and harvest the highest quality marijuana using simple techniques and inexpensive, everyday gardening tools. All of the important factors that influence growth rate, yield, and potency are covered, including lighting, planting mediums, pH, nutrients, water systems, air, and temperature. With extra focus on small gardens and security, this is the perfect book for the home grower and medical growers.

A testament to the influential nature of educational and community gardening programs for teens Part engaging conversation, part comprehensive fieldwork, Growing a Life demonstrates just how influential educational and community gardening programs can be for young teens. Follow author Illene Pevec as she travels from rural Colorado to inner city New York, agrarian New Mexico to Oakland, California, in order to study youth gardening and the benefits it contributes to at-risk teen lives. Extensive research, supplemented by beautifully candid interviews with students, illustrate the life altering physical and mental benefits that mentored gardening programs can provide. Giving readers the opportunity to examine the largely unexplored topic of urban gardening, the programs discussed present models for future educational and community based gardens. Each destination brings with it an abundance of programs geared toward educating teens by giving them the tools they will need in order to have fruitful futures. With an emphasis on positive psychology, Growing a Life delves into the minds of underprivileged teens and what gardening means to them.

Just as people are increasingly thinking about where their food comes from - and looking for greater control over their food sources - they are also seeking to take greater control of their health care. With health care costs soaring and the frightening list of side effects from pharmaceutical drugs continuing to build, many are looking to herbal medicine for a gentler, less expensive approach to treating everyday ailments. This title covers 33 common plants that can be grown nearly anywhere and used in a variety of ways, including familiar plants such as garlic, echinacea, burdock, nettles, and chamomile. It includes step-by-step instructions for drying and preserving herbs and for making the most common herbal preparations, including salves, syrups, tinctures, pills, and capsules. It features 20 basic recipes, including some "food as medicine" recipes for healing pestos, vinegars, and soups.

Take your love of plants to the next level and start growing some food with this modern, easy-to-follow guidebook that shows you everything you need to know to grow edible plants all year round!

Did you know you could grow vegetables, fruits, and herbs in containers? Well, now you can take your houseplants to the next level by growing home-grown produce and seasoning that will taste delicious in all of your favorite dishes.

How to Grow Your Own Food identifies 50 common, easy-to-grow edible plants from herbs to vegetables, along with detailed care instructions and beautiful illustrations of each plant. You’ll find everything you need to know about building your container garden including:

• How to choose the right size container for each plant
• How to water (and feed!) your plants for optimal growth
• When to harvest your crops for the best flavor
• And much more!

"As I stand at my kitchen sink and look across at what we optimistically call our herb garden, to one side I see an old wooden sign on which are carved the words 'Arthur's Garden'. Arthur doesn't live here. My wonderful great-uncle died nearly thirty years ago having spent most of his long life in the Victorian terraced house in which his mother had brought up eleven children. The sign had stood in the garden there for decades, a gift to the man who'd always cherished that small patch of Kent, creating a riot of glorious colour which lit up the row of long, narrow strips that tumbled down to a line of back gates from which you could look across the lane to the local coal yard below." In Arthur's Garden, Pam Rhodes collates a heart-warming collection of songs and poems, advice and tit bits about the glorious, very ordinary, English garden - told through the life of her Uncle Arthur. This is a gardening book, with a story.

Earthly Delights: Gardening by the Seasons the Easy Way is just the tonic for the gardener who wants that beautiful garden but doesn't want to spend six hours a day achieving it. Organized by the planting seasons, this book offers tested strategies for achieving a glorious garden without the backache and vexations. And every tip eschews chemicals and other pesticides. If you are a lazy gardener, someone on a limited budget, or someone easily intimidated by it all all this book will show you how you can overcome any of these obstacles.

Discover the incredible uses of 40 of the best home-grown and foraged ingredients as the Two Thirsty Gardeners guide you through their original brew-it-yourself recipes. Wild Tea presents easy-to-follow recipes that teach you how to collect naturally sourced ingredients - including berries, roots, seeds, leaves and flowers - for brewing your own blends and special infusions, from classic night-time and hangover teas, to chai latte and Moroccan mint, to specialist barley tea, bubble tea and even dandelion coffee. There is also a 'best of the rest' section with more unique ingredients that can be used for drinks, such as ginger, cinnamon, pomegranate, orange and valerian. Whether you are a gardener, cook or crafter, Wild Tea is the perfect guide to allow you to take your health and wellness into your own garden and create specialized brews at home.

The remarkable story of Dr Shirley Sherwood, scientist, author, travel writer, gardener as well as mother and grandmother.

Following the tragic death of her brilliant scientist husband, Michael Cross, in a freak air crash in 1964, she was left as a 30-year-old widow with two young boys aged four and three. For the next twelve years she worked as a key member of the Nobel Prize-winning team which developed Tagamet, the first blockbuster drug (sales of over $1 billion a year). After her marriage to Jim Sherwood in 1977, she left science to concentrate full-time on the huge task of restoring the fabled Orient-Express train, probably the most luxurious and exotic form of travel ever devised. The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, running between London and Venice, was relaunched in 1982, ninety-nine years after its first journey. Sherwood's history of the project sold more than 400,000 copies. The Orient-Express train was just the beginning.

The Sherwoods went on to create the five-star Orient-Express Hotels company (now Belmond), which owned some of the finest hotels in the world, including the Cipriani in Venice, the Mount Nelson in Cape Town and the Copacabana Palace in Rio. They pioneered new train routes across the Alps, started the Eastern & Oriental Express running between Singapore and Bangkok- crossing over the Bridge on the River Kwai- opened up tourism in Myanmar with the first cruise ship to operate on the Irrawaddy, and took over the railways of Peru, which run all the way to Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca.

Her most lasting achievement, the one of which she is proudest, is the Shirley Sherwood Collection of contemporary botanical art, which she started in 1990 and now includes over 1,000 paintings and drawings representing the work of more than 300 contemporary botanical artists from 36 countries. She has mounted exhibitions in many prestigious locations including the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Kirstenbosch in Cape Town and the Real Jardin Botanico, Madrid. The Shirley Sherwood Gallery in Kew Gardens is the first museum to be dedicated to modern botanical art and her books, which often accompanied her exhibitions, have been largely responsible for re-establishing botanical art in its rightful place as an important art form.

These are just some of the many achievements in a long and rich life, vividly described in this book.

This book explains everything you need to know to grow a low maintenance edible polyculture. Do you dream of a low maintenance perennial garden that is full to the brim of perennial vegetables that you don't have to keep replanting, but only have a small space? Do you struggle with too little time for gardening or controlling the pests and diseases that eat your crops? Do you want to grow unusual vegetable varieties? You can do all of this with Edible Perennial Gardening. Anni Kelsey has meticulously researched the little known subject of edible perennials and selected her favourite, tasty varieties. She explains how to source and propagate different vegetables, which plants work well together in a polyculture, and what you can plant in small, shady or semi-shady beds as well as in sunny areas.

From the best-selling author of Practical Magic Nikki Van De Car comes an essential guide to cultivating magical self-sufficiency and enchanted resilience through spell work, gardening, herbal remedies, and more. Whether we live on a farm or in a high rise, we can always create a life that is entwined with the natural world. A homestead is not a log cabin or a hermitage out in the woods -- it is a way of being, a life lived with the intention of returning to our roots and tapping into the essential elements of fire, water, air, and earth. And a homesteading witch isn't just a person who lives atop a beautiful mountain, but anyone who understands that by harnessing and honoring these elements you can create whatever it is that you need. The Witchy Homestead is your guide to finding, creating, and living this essential magic -- it is a comforting companion as you build a wellspring of magical self-sufficiency, and a seasoned teacher as you cultivate enchanted resilience. Through this book, author Nikki Van De Car will offer magically-tinged suggestions for growing or finding your own food regardless of where you live, engaging in natural healing practices, connecting to the ancient magic of the world around you, and for protecting all that you have created.

Add a touch of green to your office, bookshelf, coffee table or dorm room with these adorable mini ecosystems! A Beginner's Guide to Terrariums shows you how to create your own glass container gardens with easy-to-understand instructions and over 230 inspiring lifestyle photos. With this guide you'll learn all the basics, including how to: Decorate using a variety of plants Combine plants, rocks and other objects to achieve just the right look Choose the right container for your plants Care for a variety of plants, including low-maintenance ones like succulents, air plants and mosses This book includes 52 projects that teach you how to create a wide variety of terrariums--from open-air containers, like bowls, to jars and hanging decorations. No matter how you choose to display them, terrariums are a whimsical, easy and inexpensive addition to your home.

The Garden Interior shows the inner workings of the heart and mind of a gardener and how gardens raise up the gardener as much as the gardener tends and raises up the garden. This memoir details one family's story and is filled with beautiful observational writing, humor, and nostalgia about growing up in the 1960s and '70s, plus delicious and unusual recipes you will be longing to try. Gardens make us more than we make them, and you'll come away from The Garden Interior a better and more engaged gardener by understanding the rich interior life of this beautiful discipline and craft.

Making the most of Indigenous Trees is undoubtedly the most significant, useful and practical book ever to be published on this subject in South Africa. This third and revised edition contains 22 more tree species. The 163 tree species are alphabetically arranged according to the botanical name, illustrated with more than 850 photographs in full colour and discussed in detail. The following information is provided: An introduction section on tree propagation by seed, cuttings and truncheons. A detailed species description, diagnostic features, natural distribution and habitat. The ecological role and utilisation by mammals, birds and insects. Economic value and use by people, including use in gardens and on the farm, as a source of food for humans and animals, fibre and medicine. Properties of the wood and its utilisation by people. Specific guidelines on propagation and cultivation of each species. A map indicating the distribution of each species. More than 850 carefully selected colour photographs complement and illustrate the text. A table on the utilisation of indigenous trees by wildlife, references for further reading and an index to the common and botanical names are included. This valuable guide to indigenous trees should be within reach of every gardener, farmer, naturalist, nurseryman, forester and conservationist - in fact, anyone with a love and appreciation of trees.

William Robinson's revolutionary book, "The Wild Garden, " envisioned an authentically naturalistic approach to gardening that is more vital today than ever before. First published in 1870, "The Wild Garden" evolved through many editions and remained in print through the remainder of the author's lifetime (1838 1935). In the book, Robinson issued a forceful challenge to the prevailing style of the day, which relied upon tender plants arranged in rigidly geometrical designs. In sharp contrast, Robinson advocated for the use of hardy, locally adapted native and exotic plants arranged according to local growing conditions. Robinson's vision was inspired by his first-hand observations of natural habitats in Europe and North America, and he put his ideas into practice in his own garden at Gravetye Manor in West Sussex. "The Wild Garden" was ground-breaking and hugely influential in its day, and is stunningly relevant to twenty-first century gardeners and landscape stewards seeking to adopt sustainable design and management practices.
In addition to the complete original text and illustrations from the fifth edition of 1895, this expanded edition includes new chapters and 112 color photographs by award-winning photographer and landscape consultant Rick Darke. His new material places wild gardening in modern context, underscoring Robinson's importance in the evolution of ecological design and illustrating an inspiring diversity of contemporary wild gardens.
The potent combination presented here makes this new edition of a timeless classic an essential resource for all who wish to know how we have arrived at our present understanding of gardens and what opportunities lie ahead. As will be immediately clear to anyone who leafs through this book, Robinson's urgent message continues to resonate.
"

Agrarian Landscapes in Transition researches human interaction with the earth. With hundreds of acres of agricultural land going out of production every day, the introduction, spread, and abandonment of agriculture represents the most pervasive alteration of the Earth's environment for several thousand years. What happens when humans impose their spatial and temporal signatures on ecological regimes, and how does this manipulation affect the earth and nature's desire for equilibrium?
Studies were conducted at six Long Term Ecological Research sites within the US, including New England, the Appalachian Mountains, Colorado, Michigan, Kansas, and Arizona. While each site has its own unique agricultural history, patterns emerge that help make sense of how our actions have affected the earth, and how the earth pushes back. The book addresses how human activities influence the spatial and temporal structures of agrarian landscapes, and how this varies over time and across biogeographic regions. It also looks at the ecological and environmental consequences of the resulting structural changes, the human responses to these changes, and how these responses drive further changes in agrarian landscapes.
The time frames studied include the ecology of the earth before human interaction, pre-European human interaction during the rise and fall of agricultural land use, and finally the biological and cultural response to the abandonment of farming, due to complete abandonment or a land-use change such as urbanization.

World population is increasing at an alarming rate and this has resulted in increasing tremendously the demand for tree products such as wood for construction materials, fuel and paper, fruits, oils and medicines etc. This has put immense pressure on the world's supplies of trees and raw material to industry and will continue to do so as long as human population continues to grow. Also, the quality of human diet, especially nutritional components, is adversely affected due to limited genetic improvement of most of fruit trees. Thus there is an immediate need to increase productivity of trees. Improvement has been made through conventional breeding methods, however, conventional breeding is very slow due to long life cycle of trees. A basic strategy in tree improvement is to capture genetic gain through clonal propagation. Clonal propagation via organogenesis is being used for the production of selected elite individual trees. However, the methods are labour intensive, costly, and produce low volumes. Genetic gain can now be captured through somatic embryogenesis. Formation of embryos from somatic cells by a process resembling zygotic embryogenesis is one of the most important features of plants. In 1958, Reinert in Germany and Steward in USA independently reported somatic embryogenesis in carrot cultures. Since then, tremendous progress in somatic embryogenesis of woody and non-woody plants has taken place. It offers a potentially large-scale propagation system for superior clones.

Ground covers are widely thought of as utilitarian - we turn to them when we have a problem that needs a solution. How fast will it fill an area? Can we put it into the tight spaces between pavers? How much foot traffic can it withstand? Yet these plants also offer a diverse range of beautiful and intriguing options with a variety of colours, textures, and forms. They can unify a landscape, knit together plantings and hardscape, and add extra layers of beauty, dynamism, and surprise. As a replacement for lawns, they can reduce our use of water, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, carbon-based fuels, and transform a yard into a diverse landscape of habitat and food for native insects, birds, and other wildlife. In this meticulously researched reference, nurseryman Gary Lewis profiles more than 4000 ground covers that can perform these roles with aplomb. No matter what kinds of conditions you're facing - shade, dry soil, heavy clay, excess moisture - there's a ground cover that will thrive and beautify your garden. Comprehensive, practical, and copiously illustrated, this indispensable volume belongs on the shelf of every designer, landscape architect, and serious gardener.

Terrain's plant experts travel the world in search of the most unusual and interesting houseplants. In this inspiring and practical guide, they share their favorite specimens: exotic and eclectic ferns, like the skeleton fork, a primitive (and unfussy) predecessor to the family; new aroids to feed that monstera obsession; and adventurous trailing plants like dischidia, which is found cascading from tree branches in its native Thailand; plus succulents and cacti, indoor trees, the best low-care plants, and "rule breakers" like bamboo muhly grass that can make an unexpected move indoors. Along the way, Terrain introduces their favorite independent growers - passionate plant lovers who are creating new hybrids and bringing back old-school specimens to the market. And readers learn Terrain's way of styling and overarching philosophy on care: the most important thing we can give our plants is our presence