An entertaining and practical collection of tips and tricks to outsmart all kinds of garden pests, written by one of Britain's most influential gardeners. If you have ever waged war against squirrels to prevent them from ransacking your garden, you will know that they are wily beasts, who can find loopholes in the most cunning of defences. In this comprehensive guide, Anne Wareham recommends a host of ingenious anti-pest stratagems to protect your garden from a range of foes. Includes: * advice on dealing with all kinds of creatures, from rabbits, deer, snails and slugs to mites, beetles and bacteria - as well as weeds, the weather, people and much more * Advice is also offered on how to resist fatuous horticultural trends and ignore so-called experts. * Admitting that some pests can't be beaten, the book also advises when you should grow a different plant rather than prolonging the fight. * Author Anne Wareham is a well-known gardening expert and has been described by the Telegraph as one of Britain's most influential gardeners. Entertaining and practical, this is an honest book of advice that will be appreciated and enjoyed by amateur and professional gardeners alike. Ideal for father's day.

'Giggles, gardens and good grub - I love these girls and I love this book' Davina McCall Rhubarb Rhubarb collects the witty, wide-ranging correspondence between Leiths-trained cook Mary Jane Paterson and award-winning gardener Jo Thompson. Two good friends who found themselves in a perfect world of cupcakes and centrepieces, they decided to demystify their own skills for one another: the results are sometimes self-deprecating, often funny, and always enlightening. Jo would find herself one day panicking about what to cook for Easter lunch: a couple of emails with Mary Jane and the fear subsided, and sure enough, a delicious meal appeared on the table. Meanwhile, Jo helped Mary Jane combat her irrational fear of planting bulbs by showing how straightforward the process can be. The book is full of sane, practical advice for the general reader: it provides uncomplicated, seasonal recipes that people can make in the midst of their busy lives, just as the gardening tips are interesting, quick and helpful for beginners. Mary Jane shares secrets and knowledge gathered over a lifetime of providing fabulous food for friends and family, while Jo's expertise in beautiful planting enables the reader to have a go at simple schemes with delightful results.

The colours, shapes, and scents of flowers are as ravishing to the senses as to the soul. But it's all too easy get things wrong: colours that clash, flowers that bloom at the wrong time, plants that fail to thrive. Enter The Ultimate Flower Gardener's Guide by expert gardener Jenny Rose Carey. She tells you exactly how to get started, how to combine plants for the most spectacular effects, and how to keep your garden going from year to year. Whether you're interested in dramatic color combinations, how best to use a favorite flower, or how to create a garden for a specific purpose, such as nourishing pollinators, you'll find the answers in this friendly, information-packed book. As Jenny herself says, "Don't be afraid - just have a go!"

'Wonderfully intense and honest - a poignant manual of how to grow hope against the odds.' Chris Packham, TV presenter and author of Fingers in the Sparkle Jar Finding herself in a new home in Brighton, Kate Bradbury sets about transforming her decked, barren backyard into a beautiful wildlife garden. She documents the unbuttoning of the earth and the rebirth of the garden, the rewilding of a tiny urban space. On her own she unscrews, saws and hammers the decking away, she clears the builders' rubble and rubbish beneath it, and she digs and enriches the soil, gradually planting it up with plants she knows will attract wildlife. She erects bird boxes and bee hotels, hangs feeders and grows nectar- and pollen-rich plants, and slowly brings life back to the garden. But while she's doing this Kate's neighbours continue to pave and deck their gardens locking them away, the wildlife she tries to save is further threatened, and she feels she's fighting an uphill battle. Is there any point in gardening for wildlife when everyone else is drowning the land in poison and cement? Sadly, events take Kate away from her garden, and she finds herself back home in Birmingham where she grew up, travelling the roads she used to race down on her bike in the eighties, thinking of the gardens and wildlife she loved, witnessing more land lost beneath paving stones. If the dead could return, what would they say about the land we have taken, the ancient routes we have carved up, the wildlife we have lost?

"Walpole's achievement has to be saluted all the more when it is realized that single-handedly he determined (or distorted) the writing of landscape architecture history to this day' John Dixon Hunt in Greater Perfection: the practice of garden theory" By a mile, this is the most brilliant and most influential essay ever written on English garden history. For two centuries it mapped the whole landscape of the subject. However, the author was partial in the highest degree. Horace Walpole believed in progress, in modernisation, and the superiority of everything English to almost everything that had gone before. He had a special dislike of Baroque gardens, as exemplified by Versailles, which for him symbolised absolutism, tyranny, and the oppression of nature.

Featuring 250 of the region's most interesting and commonly encountered succulents, Guide to Succulents of Southern Africa is a guide to the identification of these increasingly popular plants.

Colour photographs vividly portray all the species covered. Authoritative text describes key identification features. Distribution maps show the occurrence of each species in Southern Africa.

This guide will have wide appeal both to naturalists and to the gardening public who, increasingly, are on the lookout for indigenous, low-maintenance and waterwise plants.

Companion planting has a long history of use by gardeners, but the explanation of why it works has been filled with folklore and conjecture. Plant Partners delivers a research-based rationale for this ever-popular growing technique, offering gardeners dozens of ways they can use scientifically tested plant partnerships to benefit the garden as a whole. Through an enhanced understanding of how plants interact with and influence each other, this guide suggests specific plant combinations that growers can use to improve soil health and weed control, decrease pest damage, and increase biodiversity, resulting in real and measurable impacts in the garden.

In this book the author describes the way her garden evolved and how, without meaning to do so, she let it take over her life. She suggests moving away from planning, regimentation and gardening with the mentality of a stamp-collector. Frequently funny and always stimulating, she writes of the alchemy of gardens, of the 19th-century plant-collectors and plant illustrators and of the gardening philosophers, all fertilizing great thoughts along with their hollyhocks. She won the 1988 Sinclair Consumer Press Garden Writer of the Year Award.

_______________ The 50 Fantastic Ideas series is packed full of fun, original, skills-based activities for Early Years practitioners to use with children aged 0-5. Each activity features step-by-step guidance, a list of resources, and a detailed explanation of the skills children will learn. Creative, simple, and highly effective, this series is a must-have for every Early Years setting. The outdoor environment is a rich, dynamic and natural space for promoting learning and development in children of all ages. Its value as an essential learning resource has been recognised by many government policies, including the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), particularly within the principle of 'Enabling Environments'. In a survey of schools who had improved their grounds, 65% reported an improved attitude to learning, 73% an improvement in behaviour and 64% a reduction in bullying. 50 Fantastic Ideas for Nursery Gardens is packed full of exciting activities, such as making a bird feeder and a garden treasure hunt, that have been tried and tested in the LEYF (London Early Years Foundation) nursery gardens with the children and nursery staff. These are designed to enrich children's skills and knowledge by broadening their horizons and opening up wider opportunities, extend language and contribute to deeper conversations about the great outdoors.

This book is a must for every lover of plants and green spaces either living in or visiting London. It has a month-by-month section highlighting what's in season and where best to see it, followed by an A Z listing giving comprehensive details of each garden with information on public transport and disability access. From snowdrop glades to tropical conservatories, from roof gardens to houseboats, from cemeteries to parkland, Lorna Parker's labour of love presents both the city's famous floral gems - such as Kew, Chiswick Gardens and Regent's Park - and its quirkier havens of horticultural interest.

The diversity of Britain's gardens reflects the great variety of conditions in different areas, but sometimes the same questions get asked as Stefan Buczacki travels to six very different locations in this book. He offers answers to those specific questions, to help gardeners everywhere to make the most of their particular conditions.

"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.

This text not only explores the breeding problems for Agaricus bisporus, the button mushroom, but approaches the subject in the context of the large range of edible mushrooms which are currently under commercial cultivation worldwide. From the background and general objectives of culture collection and breeding to the genetic systems of edible mushrooms and the molecular biological approaches to breeding, the coverage is in-depth and current. The applications of breeding programmes for specific purposes, including provision of a food source, production of high value fungal metabolites and upgrading of lignocellulosic wastes and wastewater treatment are also discussed.

'Poignant ... A meditation on life, love and the importance of nature' IRISH TIMES Thirty-four years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth. In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world. Proceeding month by month through the year, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendours, and a couple who have made their life observing its wonders.

Orchids of South Africa is the first field guide to local orchids to be published in over 30 years, and presents the more than 450 orchid species found in the region, including Lesotho and Swaziland.

A comprehensive roundup of orchids in their natural habitat, the book features:

- multiple photos for each species

- distribution maps

- flowering time-bars

- succinct text, enabling sure identification of these fascinating plants.

An illustrated introduction discusses orchid structure, ecology and conservation status.

Informative, colourful and easy-to-use, Orchids of South Africa is the authoritative update enthusiasts have been waiting for.

This volume discusses gardens as designed landscapes of mediation between nature and culture, embodying different levels of human control over wilderness, defining specific rules for this confrontation and staging different forms of human dominance. The contributing authors focus on ways of rethinking the garden and its role in contemporary society, using it as a crossover platform between nature, science and technology. Drawing upon their diverse fields of research, including History of Science and Technology, Environmental Studies, Gardens and Landscape Studies, Urban Studies, and Visual and Artistic Studies, the authors unveil various entanglements woven in the past between nature and culture, and probe the potential of alternative epistemologies to escape the predicament of fatalistic dystopias that often revolve around the Anthropocene debate. This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental and landscape history, the history of science and technology, historical geography, and the environmental humanities.

In House + Flower, Cynthia Zamaria immerses the reader in her creative process sharing how she infuses gardens, flowers and other elements of nature into sensitive home design. Through engaging photography and a welcoming narrative, this book inspires us to celebrate living environments as expressions of our personal style while also embracing a home's unique soul. With a passion for character-filled spaces, carefree floral displays, and an appreciation for vintage and artisanal objects, Cynthia's approach is timely, yet timeless. Readers are invited to see the potential in their own homes through the reimagined interiors and exteriors of the many Toronto-area residences she and her husband, Graham, have restored over the years. 'Here are houses found, embraced, personified and embodied by the spirit of the author. Cynthia gives the same generous passion to her homes as she does to her readers.' - Deborah Needleman, Author of The Perfectly Imperfect Home and co-author of the Domino Book of Decorating

This book offers everything you need to know when planning a garden, including advice on drawing your own garden plan; how to create garden features such as walls, ponds, patios and arches; and how to deal with every kind of garden site. It features over 2,000 photographs - both how-to step-by-step pictures and also beautiful inspirational images. It shows you how to choose the best plants for your garden environment, with a directory of over 1,000 plants that will thrive in a variety of conditions. It includes projects and ideas for the kitchen garden, flower garden, greenhouse and conservatory. Successful gardening requires a combination of thorough planning and skilled execution, and this book offers all the creative ideas and practical solutions you need to help you make the most of the space you have available. Each chapter lists alphabetically the plants that do well under specific conditions and clearly identifies them with a photograph. There is guidance on when to carry out essential tasks and when to plan and implement creative projects, and advice on indoor gardening and house plant care. Containing over 2,000 beautiful photographs, this book will provide all the gardening information you need to create your perfect outdoor and indoor space.

Bees are vital for the future of the planet, for without their dedicated pollinating skills many crops would eventually fail. This delightfully illustrated book is a homage to bees, revealing many facets of their lives, including homes, flight patterns and defence. It also describes how to attract bees to your garden and, essentially, the art of talking to them! The lives of bees are interwoven with our own, but how much do you know about them? Which scents do bees prefer? How do bees transport pollen? How far can bees fly? Do specific colours attract bees? Do bees prefer native flowers? Then there is honey - a near-miraculous elixir that in earlier generations was an integral part of life as a sweetener and food preserver. It can be fermented with water and yeast to create mead, a drink that has been enjoyed for thousands of years. This book is dedicated to bees and to ensuring that they continue to live in harmony with humans in bee-friendly gardens. Click on the image to look inside:

'Adagio' is Trisha Dixon's charming musing on slow gardening and the importance of stopping to enjoy life. With a strong environmental message about ethical and sustainable living, 'Adagio' blends personal anecdote with musings and facts, drawing on Trisha's gardening background and her wide-ranging interests.