'RHS Small Garden Handbook...show[s] the process of planning, planting and maintaining an outdoor space that will lift your heart every time you step outside.' - The Independent 'Clear and practical principles of design' - BBC Gardens Illustrated A garden offers invaluable space for relaxing entertaining, and, above all, enjoying the huge pleasure of growing your own flowers, shrubs, trees, and crops. However, a small garden can present challenges to even the most experience gardener: it may be overlooked, which can impact upon your privacy; there may be more shade than you would like; and it may not be immediately obvious how to create a space that is both multifunctional and beautiful. RHS Small Garden Handbook provides an all-in-one guide for small space gardeners and draws on the experience in growing, planting, landscaping and design for which the RHS is world famous. It begins by explaining how to assess your plot so that you are aware of the soil, orientation, microclimate, existing materials and proportions that you have to work with, before revealing the principles of good design. Showing how your decisions on layout, colour and texture will affect the finished design and what tricks can be played to create a greater sense of space - with everything from expert design advice on boundaries, hedges and fences to clever ideas for containers and storage - every gardener will gain confidence in creating a garden to enjoy no matter how big the plot. Each of the nine chapters includes 15 ways to make instant improvements and a real-life case study to inspire change. All the gardens featured in the book's 300 photographs are accessible, achievable and truly inspirational. Contents Includes... Basics Design Styles Materials Boundaries Structures Water Planting Upkeep ... and much much more!

Death and Garden Narratives in Literature, Art and Film: Song of Death in Paradise explores the combination of two motifs, death and gardens, to show how the two subjects are intertwined and used in various media and cultural contexts. Using cultural, literary, film, and art history theories, the contributors analyze various death and garden sceneries in literary works by Arthur Machen, Agatha Christie, J.K. Rowling, as well as in superhero comics, films, and cultural and art contexts such as Ian Hamilton Finley's "Little Sparta," the poetic verses from the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden in South Africa, and the Australian wilderness.

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.

Philosophy and gardens have been closely connected from the dawn of philosophy, with many drawing on their beauty and peace for philosophical inspiration. Gardens in turn give rise to a broad spectrum of philosophical questions. For the green-fingered thinker, this book reflects on a whole host of fascinating philosophical themes. * Gardens and philosophy present a fascinating combination of subjects, historically important, and yet scarcely covered within the realms of philosophy * Contributions come from a wide range of authors, ranging from garden writers and gardeners, to those working in architecture, archaeology, archival studies, art history, anthropology, classics and philosophy * Essays cover a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from Epicurus and Confucius to the aesthetics and philosophy of Central Park * Offers new perspectives on the experience and evaluation of gardens

Our penchant for keeping house plants is an ancient practice dating back to the Pharaohs. House Plants explores the stories behind the plants we bring home and how they were transformed from wild plants into members of our households. A billion-dollar global industry, house plants provide an interaction with nature, and contribute to our health, happiness and wellbeing. They also support their own miniature ecosystems and are part of the home biome. Featuring many superb illustrations, House Plants explores both their botanical history and cultural impact, from song (Gracie Fields's Biggest Aspidistra in the World), literature (Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying) and cinema (Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors) to fashion, technology, contemporary design, and painting.

In this first substantial study of Emily Dickinson's devotion to flowers and gardening, Judith Farr seeks to join both poet and gardener in one creative personality. She casts new light on Dickinson's temperament, her aesthetic sensibility, and her vision of the relationship between art and nature, revealing that the successful gardener's intimate understanding of horticulture helped shape the poet's choice of metaphors for every experience: love and hate, wickedness and virtue, death and immortality.

Gardening, Farr demonstrates, was Dickinson's other vocation, more public than the making of poems but analogous and closely related to it. Over a third of Dickinson's poems and nearly half of her letters allude with passionate intensity to her favorite wildflowers, to traditional blooms like the daisy or gentian, and to the exotic gardenias and jasmines of her conservatory. Each flower was assigned specific connotations by the nineteenth century floral dictionaries she knew; thus, Dickinson's association of various flowers with friends, family, and lovers, like the tropes and scenarios presented in her poems, establishes her participation in the literary and painterly culture of her day. A chapter, "Gardening with Emily Dickinson" by Louise Carter, cites family letters and memoirs to conjecture the kinds of flowers contained in the poet's indoor and outdoor gardens. Carter hypothesizes Dickinson's methods of gardening, explaining how one might grow her flowers today.

Beautifully illustrated and written with verve, "The Gardens of Emily Dickinson" will provide pleasure and insight to a wide audience of scholars, admirers of Dickinson's poetry, and garden lovers everywhere.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2021* 'A wholly original, semi-autobiographical book on how to live, how to be calm and content with only a little, in a quietly humming garden' Daily Mail Beautifully illustrated, Seed to Dust is a reflective and restorative account of a life lived in harmony with nature. Marc Hamer has nurtured the same twelve acres of garden for decades. It's rarely visited so he is the only person who fully knows its secrets. But it's not his garden, and his relationship with its owner is at once distant and curiously intimate. In Seed to Dust, Marc takes us month-by-month through his experiences both working in the garden and outside it. We encounter new plants and wildlife, gardening folklore and the joys of manual work; we learn, too, about Marc's path from homelessness to family contentment, and the cycles of change that run through both the garden's life and our own. 'An absorbing combination of memoir, gardening folklore and natural history' Country Life 'Life-affirming... Absorbing' Sue Stuart-Smith, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Well-Gardened Mind

Gardening doesn't have to be difficult, and Kate Frey - expert gardener and designer - makes it easier than ever with her new book, Ground Rules. Frey distills the vital lessons gardening into 100 simple rules that, if followed, will yield a gorgeous, healthy, and thriving home garden. New home gardeners will discover tips on garden design, care and maintenance, healthy soil, and the best ways to water. They'll learn how create a garden that encourages birds and butterflies, how to how to choose healthy plants at the garden center, how and when to re-pot a container, and much more. With bite-size chunks of expert information and nearly 100 inspiring photographs, Ground Rules packs a lot of value into its playful package and will be a go-to resource for gardeners everywhere.