in case you haven't heard enough about gardening

This really isn't a gardening blog but it's hard to tell lately since that's all I've talked about. It's certainly more interesting than talking about my business accounting or cleaning my house, which are the other things I've focused on this week. So, to continue the theme for one more day, let's talk about gardening books.

I actually read quite a bit of non-fiction and gardening books are something I've been turning to lately. Not so much the how-to books but the ones that read like fiction, the personal accounts of people's attempts to garden for the first time or to live closer to the land. I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle right now (from the library) and picked up several interesting-sounding books on my recent trip to the used book store:
• Letters from the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind by Stephen Buchman
• Two Gardeners (Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence): A Friendship in Letters edited by Emily Herring Wilson

I'll probably save them to read this winter when there's snow on the ground and the garden seems like a distant memory.

If gardening books interest you, too, you might want to check out Barnes and Noble's weekly roundup of five themed books. This week's theme is gardening and a few of their featured books are going on my must-read list.



• Old Herbaceous by Reginald Arkell
Arkell’s 1950 tale chronicles Bert Pinnegar’s eight decades in an English manor house garden.

• Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols
Nichols’ 1932 memoir of a cottage in the British countryside and its attendant flora.

• The Education of a Gardener by Russell Page
One of the most famous garden architects of his time, Page (1906 – 1985) designed the gardens at Leeds castle and the grounds of PepsiCo headquarters in Purchase, NY.

• Gardening for Love by Elizabeth Lawrence (yes, the same woman in the Two Gardeners book mentioned above)
This book, by an American original once called “the Jane Austen of the gardening literary world,” chronicles the author’s long correspondence with a circle of Southern women who traded seeds and bulbs through agricultural market bulletins.

Back to stitchery and needlework next week- I promise :)