Price : $21.94

Product Description

Once maligned as a swampy outpost, the fledgling city of Chicago brazenly adopted the motto Urbs in Horto or City in a Garden, in 1837. Chicago Gardens shows how this upstart town earned its sobriquet over the next century, from the first vegetable plots at Fort Dearborn to innovative garden designs at the 1933 Worlds Fair.
Cathy Jean Maloney has spent decades researching the citys horticultural heritage, and here she reveals the unusual history of Chicagos first gardens. Challenged by the regions clay soil, harsh winters, and fierce winds, Chicagos pioneering horticulturalists, Maloney demonstrates, found imaginative uses for hardy prairie plants. This same creative spirit thrived in the citys local fruit and vegetable markets, encouraging the growth of what would become the nations produce hub. The vast plains that surrounded Chicago, meanwhile, inspired early landscape architects, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen, and O.C. Simonds, to new heights of grandeur.
Maloney does not forget the backyard gardeners: immigrants whocultivated treasuredseedsand pioneers who planted native wildflowers. Maloneys vibrant depictions of Chicagoans like Bouquet Mary, a flower peddler who built a greenhouse empire, add charming anecdotal evidence to her argumentthat Chicagos garden history rivals that of New York or London and ensures its status as a world-class capital of horticultural innovation.
With exquisite archival photographs, prints, and postcards, as well as field guide descriptions of living legacy gardens for todays visitors, Chicago Gardens will delight green-thumbs from all parts of the world. (30081123)

Price : $11.26

Product Description

Discover the secrets of a naturally pest-proof vegetable garden with Great Garden Companions. Let master gardener Sally Jean Cunningham show you how to keep pests and diseases at bay with her unique companion-gardening system. By planting special combinations of vegetables, flowers, and herbs, you can minimize pest and disease problems and create a high-yielding, beautiful garden!

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-09-05
I’m an avid gardener, and I garden organically. My specialty has always been ornamentals, but recently I’ve become interested in vegetable gardening. This book has been a great resource to help me understand how to layout and manage a sustainable organic garden that is productive, beautiful, and fun to work in. Although there are not many color photos in this book, there are many illustrations that provide the nuts-and-bolts of laying out a garden. In addition, there are lists of vegetables and companions, along with information that specifies when to plant, basic plant requirements, and when/how to harvest. This book is fun to read and a great resource to refer to again and again.

Review date : 2008-07-08
i checked this book out from the library, and let my neighbor borrow it. she liked it so much didn’t want to give it back. as soon as i started reading it, i understood why. it’s very approachable, and has lots of crucial information for first-year and experienced gardeners alike. and it’s got nice pictures and clear diagrams. i really like the "top crops and how to grow them" section.
so i bought my own copy, and i’ve been showing it to everyone who stops by to see my veggies. i like her "messy-looking" technique of interplanting all different kinds of vegetables. altho i should have paid more attention to how far apart to plant seeds, i had a veritable tomato forest under my squashes.
i bought another copy for my stepmom, and she loved it. she’s a top notch gardener. she wrote to say this book had answered some of her longtime questions, and she had only owned it for a few hours. she said the book was "awesome" and she uses it frequently.
i have half a dozen gardening books, but this is the one i re-read most often.

Review date : 2008-06-14
I checked this book out through inter-library loan - had to return it last week & am really missing it! So needless to say will be buying my own copy soon. I had read some other books on companion planting but they weren’t as thorough or impressive as this one. Excellent resource, especially for beginners. The bulk of the book is about companion planting but she also discusses the marits of mulching, composting, beneficial bugs & more in an easy to read format. I personally have never been to fond of the separate "garden plot" - off, alone by itself (never mind that we don’t currantly have the space on our city lot for one anyway :). Have already put some of companion planting to practice & so far am having success (you should see my leafy lettuce & spinach!). This is a great book for many reasons - it’s a budget friendly, green guide to gardening! Blessings…

Review date : 2008-06-06
I am findingg this book to be very interesting and helpful My goal is to not have to use any pesticides and garden in a very small space. This book is giving me many helpful ideas.

Review date : 2008-05-19
I love this book. It is filled with loads of useful information explained in a clear and concise manner. Not only is it a great book to own, but it is also a great book to give as a gift.

Price : $18.78

Product Description

Inspirational, practical, and easy to use, this book was created with the aim of conveying the awesome diversity and beauty of California’s native plants and demonstrating how they can be brought into ecologically sound, attractive, workable, and artful gardens. Structured around major California plant communities–bluffs, redwoods, the Channel Islands, coastal scrub, grasslands, deserts, oak woodlands, mixed evergreen woodlands, riparian, chaparral, mountain meadows, and wetlands–the book’s twelve chapters each include sample plans for a native garden design accompanied by original drawings, color photographs, a plant list, tips on successful gardening with individual species, and more. Both residential and professional gardeners will learn the benefits of going native with gardens that require less water and fewer fertilizers, attract wildlife, engage the senses, create a sense of place, and, at the same time, preserve our rich natural heritage.
Designing Native California Gardens includes:
* More than 600 selected native species recommended for the garden
* More than 300 photographs of native plants, natural plant communities, and residential native gardens
* Recommended places to visit for viewing each plant community

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-06-08
I was looking for a book that would give me a comprehensive guide to xeriscaping with native plants. This book contains one section that approaches my needs but is more of an overview over the native plants of the many diverse vegetation zones of the states. For what it is, it is a nice book. Just not a match for me.

Review date : 2007-11-18
This book is a must have for the California native gardener. I’d say the book’s biggest strength is in its’ inspiration- contains nice photographs of natural landscapes and gardens modeled after them. It groups plants by communities which is nice, though maybe hard to do. I know I live in an area which doesn’t fit exactly into of any of the communities they list, but I can still get the idea they are trying to convey, and look around at what is in my community. California is so diverse you almost want a bunch of more specific and in-depth books for different areas inside California, but I guess maybe those areas of interest are too small to sell enough books to make it worth the while.

It does a good job listing different kinds of plants, my only complaint with this book is that I would have liked more pictures accompanying each plant for which information is given- because you really can’t tell from the brief physical description what the plant looks like. As someone else has mentioned, this book is best paired with California Native Plants For The Garden. However, this complaint should be taken with a grain of salt, for designing a California native garden I think this book is the best on the market. Together, these two books provide the backbone to build your California native plant book collection around.

Review date : 2007-11-14
Love this book, gets you to think in terms of plant groupings & not just on a singular level.

Review date : 2007-10-10
-We need more books like this to make Native Gardening more amenable. What "Landscapers’ Challenge" did for Landscaping, this book will hopefully start to do to open up the still rather arcane world of Native Plants. It is practical and full of detailed, appropriate, high quality photographs of sample materials. Visually on par with "Landscape Plants for Western Regions" by Perry.

Review date : 2007-09-26
This book is excellent, with many good photographic examples of complete native landscape. It also set for an excellent philosophy for landscape design for the both the use of native and non-native plants. However it really shouldn’t be thought of as a complete source for native gardening. I would also suggest that you pick up ‘California Native Plants for the Garden’ by Carol Bornstein, David Fross, and Bart O’Brien. Even between these two books all of the possibilities for beautiful California native plants and landscapes created using them have not yet been fully explored, but these books are an excellent start.