Any avid gardener knows the frustration of searching in vain for realistic and practical gardening resources. Coffee-table books full of lush images of English country gardens and technical volumes on landscape design are of little use to dirt-under-the-nails gardeners seeking straight answers to questions about planning a cutting garden that really produces. Suzanne McIntire provides a bumper crop of such down-to-earth help in An American Cutting Garden. Using both common and botanical names, she discusses in depth a wide variety of herbaceous perennials, biennials, annuals, and bulbs and provides sensible directions for choosing ideal plants. Often illustrating her advice with personal accounts of mistakes and successes, McIntire supplies information on a wide range of topics: how many plants are needed of any one kind, when and how to successfully sow seed outdoors, the heat-hardiness of plants, and strategies for coping with the effects of hot summers and cold winters. She also describes the simple and rewarding ""haphazard school"" of flower arranging. Special chapters sympathetically address the beginner's cutting garden, a cutting garden for small spaces and another for shade, and autumn in the cutting garden. A series of invaluable appendices offer instruction for starting seed under lights, list plants that self-sow in the author's garden, and provide sources for plants. From the earliest pansy (Viola x wittrockiana) to the latest chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum pacificum), a unique section lists hundreds of plants in order of bloom throughout the growing year, enabling both the novice and the experienced gardener to plan for complementary blooms and to extend the cut-flower season. An American Cutting Garden is a real gardener's gardening book and will be enormously helpful even to those who don't grow flowers for cutting.

Speeches in World History is an impressive compilation of 200 of the world's greatest speeches from all major civilizations and throughout history - arranged in chronological order. Each section of this comprehensive collection, roughly corresponding to the eras used in the national world history standards, begins with an introduction that outlines key events that occurred during this time period. The documents come with an introduction that places each speech in historical context - explaining why it was significant and what happened as a result - and provides key information on the orator. This title features, Socrates: ""The Trial"" (399 BCE, Athens); Boudicca: ""A Woman's Resolve"" (61 CE, Britain); Muhammad: ""The Farewell Sermon: (632, Arabia)Musang: ""Preaching the Dharma"" (c. 728-762, Korea); William the Conqueror: ""Before the Battle of Hastings"" (1066, England); Pope Urban II: ""Calling for a Crusade to the Holy Land"" (1095, France); Nichiren: ""My Life Is the Lotus Sutra"" (1271, Japan); Moctezuma: ""Welcoming Hernan Cortes to Mexico"" (1519, Mexico); Martin Luther: ""I Stand Here and Can Say No More"" (1521, Germany); Queen Elizabeth I: ""The Heart and Stomach of a King"" (1588, England); Galileo Galilei: ""Abjuration before the Roman Inquisition"" (1633, Italy); Charles I: ""From the Scaffold"" (1649, Great Britain); Benjamin Franklin: ""To the Constitutional Convention"" (1787, United States); and, George Washington: ""Observe Good Faith and Justice to All Nations"" (1796, United States).