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.

With this kit, complete with a 32page book explaining bonsai gardening, an instruction sheet, a small pot, a peat pellet, a packet of seeds, and a pair of scissors, indoor gardeners can grow a peaceful mini-garden anywhere they choose. Whether it's on a desk or in a kitchen, this little bit of greenery will brighten up the day-just add water! Also available in a full-size kit

Using seasonal checklists and Charles Dowding's expert no-dig advice, this month-by-month journal helps you plan bumper harvests the no-dig way. From tomatoes to basil, carrots to coriander, Charles Dowding, the UK's leading no-dig guru shows you how to grow a year's worth of healthy, organic crops while preserving the soil's integrity in this complete and comprehensive guide. Follow simple steps to find success, growing more than 35 vegetables and herbs in a range of easy and accessible projects suited to all kinds of spaces and environments. Start a no-dig vegetable plot on virgin or dug ground, improve the soil and become an expert mulcher and weeder, as well as learning the techniques for intercropping, companion planting, seed viability and crop succession. This easy-to-follow step-by-step guide by one of Britain's top gardeners is illustrated with photos to help you learn how to plan a vegetable garden, construct a raised bed, sow seed indoors and outdoors in spring, grow on young crops, protect plants from the weather and pests through the season and, finally, celebrate the joy of harvesting. Organised monthly from January to December, this journal is full of key dates for sowing, staking, harvesting and storing, as well as time-saving monthly checklists to help ensure a successful no-dig harvest.

Learn how to make and use nourishing compost for your garden with this handy little guidebook from an experienced National Trust head gardener. It's packed with useful tips for successful composting, from deciding what to put in your kitchen compost caddy to how to use the final product in your garden. The author discusses the various composting set-ups you can choose, from simple plastic cone-shaped 'Dalek' bins to ingenious hand-rotated barrels and elaborate solar-powered hot composting systems, and gives full instructions to make a professional-looking three-bay compost heap from old pallets. Also covered are unusual and innovative techniques such as keyhole gardening and lasagne planting, and there's a guide to wormeries and, for the very adventurous, snaileries. He also reveals the many uses to which compost can be put in your garden, and not just to grow plants in - as a top dressing to keep your lawn looking fresh and green, as mulch for your flower beds, or, in liquid form, as a powerfully nutritious plant feed. And there's a handy guide to which bits of kitchen waste you can put into your compost, and which you really shouldn't. Finally, if you've always wanted an exceptionally environmentally friendly composting toilet, instructions are here. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this practical guide contains all the advice you'll ever need to get your compost going and use it to help your garden thrive.

Natural swimming pools rely on the correct balance of living plants and micro-organisms to clean and purify the water. They are easy and less costly to maintain than chemical pools. Chlorine and other common pool chemicals that are hazardous to human health are not used. Natural pools are safe places for children to play and birds to drink, and are a dramatic example of ecological design, combining the natural and man-made worlds while creating beauty. These pools offer enjoyment not only in the warm months, but during winter, when they can be used for ice skating. Often the focal point of a garden, a natural swimming pool blends into the environment, flowing into the surroundings with plants and rocks. It reflects the changing seasons and enhances the environment naturally. This book is a necessary resource for people who consider a natural swimming pool. It shows how the natural system works to provide environmental, health, and safety benefits. Drawings, diagrams, and charts help explain their planning, design, biology, materials, construction, planting, and maintenance. Over 300 beautiful color photographs of natural pools will inspire your own water garden, where you can swim in harmony with nature.

Zero-Waste Gardening is your essential go-to guide to growing your own food for maximum taste and minimum waste. Organic gardening expert, Ben Raskin, shares over 60 unique planning-for-yield guides for key crops. Work out how to make the most of the green space you have got, what to grow easily in it, and how much you will harvest seasonally for zero waste. Learn about the roots of organic gardening, and unearth how to plant waste-free for any size plot, from balcony containers to 5-metre-square yards. Peppered with root-to-stalk cooking techniques, and edibility tips including which crops you can eat straight away, this is a plot-to-plate handbook for everyone with a green-thumb. Perfect for new and experienced growers, zero-food waste followers, city gardeners, and the ecologically minded, this is the only gardening book you will ever need!

In this book, Sharon Amos explains how to design and create a beautiful garden for little or no money, offering tips on bartering for clippings, getting a bargain at garage sales or neighbourhood fairs, digging up suckers or adapting wild species and controlling them in a garden environment. She provides a comprehensive directory of 80 plants including detailed advice on where and how to grow a wide variety of garden favourites, from snowdrops to poppies. With beautiful illustrations, Plants for Free is the perfect gift book for cultivating your garden on a budget of next-to-nothing.

From cocoa farming in Ghana to the orchards of Kent and the desert badlands of Pakistan, taking a practical approach to sustaining the landscape can mean the difference between prosperity and ruin. Working with Nature is the story of a lifetime of work, often in extreme environments, to harvest nature and protect it - in effect, gardening on a global scale. It is also a memoir of encounters with larger-than-life characters such as William Bunting, the gun-toting saviour of Yorkshire's peatlands and the aristocratic gardener Vita Sackville-West, examining their idiosyncratic approaches to conservation. Jeremy Purseglove explains clearly and convincingly why it's not a good idea to extract as many resources as possible, whether it's the demand for palm oil currently denuding the forests of Borneo, cottonfield irrigation draining the Aral Sea, or monocrops spreading across Britain. The pioneer of engineering projects to preserve nature and landscape, first in Britain and then around the world, he offers fresh insights and solutions at each step.

In Postcards from the Hedge, Jill Appenzeller reflects on life, family, and human nature in the context of her ever-changing garden. The book is a collection of vivid vignettes that span all four seasons as well as decades of memories both in and out of the garden. From Gossip Girls, the story of the neighborhood kids organizing a garden club, to I Don't Want It Perfect I Want It Tuesday, about all the things that never get done in life as well as in the garden, this is the story of humbling failures and unexpected surprises, of friends and friendships, and the gift of being present in the moment. Filled with humorous anecdotes and surprising insights. Postcards from the Hedge explores what gardening can teach us about ourselves and the world we live in.

Veronica Fowler's comprehensive step-by-step manual shows you not only how to install your water garden, but maintain it entirely on your own."Backyard Water Gardens" teaches you how to install liners, pre-formed shapes, containers, and aboveground pools and fountains. From there, it helps you choose plants, add them to your garden, fertilize, prune, divide, and ward off pests and diseases. But Fowler's book goes far beyond the basics, covering all the maintenance and troubleshooting of water feature hardscapes--from a rip in a liner, to a damaged pool, to maintaining equipment and filters (including seasonal maintenance for winter care). Veronica Fowler's "Backyard Water Gardens" allows you to fully enjoy the convenience and versatility of water gardening, all while maintaining it with ease for years to come."Backyard Water Gardens" is truly an all-inclusive manual, encompassing every style, type, and size of water feature imaginable. No matter the "feel" you wish to convey in your garden--casual, formal, or whimsical--Fowler's book enables you to create it with confidence. Your range of hardscape options is incredibly vast, from small, container-sized fountains that complement any space with added sound and movement, to large in-ground or aboveground ponds and streams. Larger installations not only provide soothing, rejuvenating sights and sounds; they can also house fish and plants and passively attract natural wildlife to your backyard.

Landscape designing isn’t so much about rules that guarantee creation of the ‘perfect design every time’, but rather about a series of guidelines and suggestions that will help you save time and money, as well as generally reduce the frustrations resulting from many design forms.

Landscape Design for the Home Owner is a book filled with such guidelines, some for the new home owner to help with the many ‘first time garden’ situations and pitfalls that tend to arise, as well as some for the more experienced home owner who is being challenged with alterations, changes in garden styles or themes or simply looking at old sites in a new light.

Combine this with dozens of ideas, plant and hard landscape suggestions, as well as numerous beautiful photographs, it becomes a book that will help the informed, adventurous, beginner or even laid-back home owner to create beautiful and distinctive surroundings to their homes.

Beautifully and simply set out, it takes the home owner through a series of logical yet important steps intended to make garden designing a joy rather than a mystery or frustration – dealing with such aspects as site analysis, plant functions and choices, hard landscape options, thoughts on garden revamping, as well as realistic scenarios for costing a project and pointers on where to find professional assistance if stuck with a problem. Aspects such as water-saving concepts, ways to encourage wild life, and thoughts on environmental or regional approaches to garden design are also included. A list of current invader plants and useful contacts in South Africa are also included for the reader’s convenience.

Revel in the extraordinary expressions of water-inspired architecture known as AquaTekture! Discover the vision and construction challenges imaginative designers faced to craft the inspirational designs shown here. Unconventional, daring, and creative are only some of the words used to describe these pools, spas, and water environments. Now in its third year, the Global AquaTekture Visionary Awards (GAVA) features 59 exceptional installations. View magnificent visions of artisans who garnered these coveted awards. Over 190 color photos take you on a private tour around the globe to view awe-inspiring, prized design applications. Enjoy projects that exemplify AquaTekture, including water-inspired architecture from exclusive residences in Australia, Acapulco, and Austin, to the Swarovski Crystal Sparkling Hill Resort holistic spa in Canada and Francis Ford Coppola's Winery in California.

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.

Howard Resh is internationally known as a pioneering hydroponics researcher: previous editions of this book are known as the "Bible" of the industry. Comprehensive guide to soilless culture with extensively new and updated content - perfect for both commercial and hobby growers. Covers media, lights and nearly every method of hydroponic gardening, and provides charts, equations, and diagrams for easy understanding. Presents greenhouse environmental control systems and examples of sustainable greenhouse technology, and demonstrates uses of automation and robotics in harvesting, grading, and packing. Introduces indoor vertical farming, and vertical growing systems, as well as the expansion of tropical hydroponics and rooftop greenhouses. Provides information on automation in large-scale raft culture and nutrient film technique (NFT) operations in the growing of lettuce, leafy greens, and herbs.

For those without the time or stamina to spend hours maintaining a garden, well-known experts Alan and Gill Bridgewater offer an easy-care method with minimal digging and weeding. They show how to make raised beds, build up soil with mushroom compost, cover weeds with mulch, and protect plants with nets and plastic--all using organic methods whenever possible. A must for every gardener.

Designing real gardens on slopes for real people forms the central core of this book. It demonstrates that making plans for gardens on slopes of all types really works. Not only that, they are a necessary part of the process of turning challenging sites into attractive gardens. This is a really useful book that shows how good design helps to avoid costly common mistakes. It is a simple and informative guide detailing from survey to construction and planting. Not many gardens are completely flat. Just one step in a garden makes a big difference, adding more interest to the site. But slopes do present more of a challenge when designing gardens and definitely add to the expense of a building project. A select portfolio of beautifully designed gardens shows projects from start to finish. These are not simply attractive garden plans - they actually work! Not only does this book inspire, it will show how to master hilly sites. There are currently no books that deal specifically with this common problem: in fact, in many books, designing gardens on slopes is barely mentioned. Students of garden design, qualified garden and landscape designers, landscape builders and architects, and owners of sloping gardens will therefore find this book particularly useful.

As Florida is developed the native flora is often replaced with non-native plants. Wildlife habitat is reduced; water, fertilizer and pesticide usage increases; and the appearance of Florida is altered. But you can help reduce the damage being done to our ecosystems by viewing your yard as part of the natural system. This book will help you make a plan that will work for your yard and choose the native plants that will thrive there. You will have the joy of creating an aesthetically pleasing, life-supporting, and environmentally sensitive landscape. Methods for a small fruit and vegetable garden are also covered.