Gardens are immobile, literally rooted in the earth, but they are also shaped by migration and by the transnational movement of ideas, practices, plants, and seeds. In "Paradise Transplanted," Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo reveals how successive conquests and diverse migrations have made Southern California gardens, and in turn how gardens influence social inequality, work, leisure, status, and our experiences of nature and community. Drawing on historical archival research, ethnography, and over one hundred interviews with a wide range of people including suburban homeowners, paid Mexican immigrant gardeners, professionals at the most elite botanical garden in the West, and immigrant community gardeners in the poorest neighborhoods of inner-city Los Angeles, this book offers insights into the ways that diverse global migrations and garden landscapes shape our social world.

For Rebecca Bushnell, English gardening books tell a fascinating tale of the human love for plants and our will to make them do as we wish. These books powerfully evoke the desires of gardeners: they show us gardeners who, like poets, imagine not just what is but what should be. In particular, the earliest English garden books, such as Thomas Hill's The Gardeners Labyrinth or Hugh Platt's Floraes Paradise, mix magical practices with mundane recipes even when the authors insist that they rely completely on their own experience in these matters. Like early modern "books of secrets," early gardening manuals often promise the reader power to alter the essential properties of plants: to make the gillyflower double, to change the lily's hue, or to grow a cherry without a stone. Green Desire describes the innovative design of the old manuals, examining how writers and printers marketed them as fiction as well as practical advice for aspiring gardeners. Along with this attention to the delights of reading, it analyzes the strange dignity and pleasure of garden labor and the division of men's and women's roles in creating garden art. The book ends by recounting the heated debate over how much people could do to create marvels in their own gardens. For writers and readers alike, these green desires inspired dreams of power and self-improvement, fantasies of beauty achieved without work, and hopes for order in an unpredictable world not so different from the dreams of gardeners today."

From the Booker Prize winner and national bestselling author, reflections on gardening, art, literature, and life Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden to Sissinghurst and into her own backyard, traversing the lives of writers like Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin while imparting her own sly and spare wisdom. "Her body of work proves that certain themes never go out of fashion," writes the New York Times Book Review, as true of this beautiful volume as of the rest of the Lively canon. Now in her eighty-fourth year, Lively muses, "To garden is to elide past, present, and future; it is a defiance of time."

Step-by-step instructions lead readers through the process of creating their own rockwool hydroponic garden. Included are tips from professional growers for making plants grow faster and more lushly in rockwool.

First monograph to present the work of Laguardia Design Group, a highly regarded landscape architecture firm specializing in contemporary residential design in the Hamptons. With offices in Water Mill, LaGuardia Design Group is immersed in the fragile landscape of the Hamptons, both its woods and meadows and the dramatic shoreline along the Atlantic. Notable projects include the rebuilding of the dunescape surrounding a landmark Norman Jaffe house damaged by storms, collaborations with well-known contemporary architects, and the setting for a distinguished collection of contemporary sculpture in Bridgehampton. Founded in 1994 by Christopher LaGuardia, this firm is committed to expressing the character of each site and recognized for its environmental stewardship, historic references, and meticulously designed outdoor spaces. Rather than attempting to mimic nature, LDG's goal with every design is to interpret natural processes as an artistic expression in their work. In 2013, LDG received the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) award of excellence in residential design, the highest residential award in the profession.

Whether your aspirations are simply to sell a selection of home grown plants from the boot of your car or to establish a succesful all-year-round gardening business, this book will show you how. It covers: preparing your business plan; getting kitted out; how to find work - and keep it; what services to offer; book-keeping for gardeners; planning the gardening year; how to get commercial contracts; providing estimates; the top ten most profitable gardening jobs.

It all began when Simon Griffiths decided that he and his whippet couldn't live in his tiny but gorgeous one-up one-down shopfront in Melbourne any more. He had a yearning for open spaces, country air and, most importantly, a garden of his own. On finding his cottage in Meadowbank, just outside Sydney, and trialling different plants, he gradually became part of the secret gardening network - the one where cuttings are exchanged between friends, and planting successes and failures are recounted over neighbourhood fences. Simon is a brilliant photographer, bringing warmth and joy to all his subjects, but he is also a very knowledgeable plantsman. In this book he has captured his favourite twenty country-style gardens and shares the knowledge he has gleaned from fellow garden lovers.