Book - The Heirloom Life Gardener

The founder of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company offers a comprehensive guide to cultivating heirloom vegetables and a wealth of tips and techniques for planting, growing, harvesting and saving seeds, as well as instructions for canning and preserving.

Shop for book: The Heirloom Life Gardener

Link to book excerpt and NPR interview with author: NPR Interview - Gardener Gives Heirloom Life

Book - Seeing Trees: Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees

Nancy Ross Hugo and Robert Llewellyn have crafted this captivating book that describes the rewards of careful and regular tree viewing, outlines strategies for improving your observations, and describes some of the most visually interesting tree structures, including leaves, flowers, buds, leaf scars, twigs, and bark. In-depth profiles of ten familiar species — including such beloved trees as white oak, southern magnolia, white pine, and tulip poplar — show you how to recognize and understand many of their most compelling (but usually overlooked) physical features.

Nancy Ross Hugo's delightful text and Robert Llewellyn's breathtaking photographs deliver a steady stream of small astonishments that not only underscore the fascinating physiology of trees but will bring you into a closer, more intimate relationship with these miracles of nature.

Green Neighbors: Turn-of-the-(last) Century Gardening

By Ron Sullivan

Joe gave me an antique garden book as a 36th anniversary present. A true antique, over a century old: The Garden Book of California, by Belle Sumner Angier, 1906, Paul Elder and Company. It does not have an ISBN number, nor does the publisher’s address have a ZIP code. Last month I read, somewhere, a question regarding an heirloom watch that was having battery trouble. Heirloom watches have batteries? This Ain’t Right, the way It Ain’t Right to walk into an antique shop and see a display of LPs that you remember having sex to. The book does have a few uncut pages, which are a truly tantalizing dilemma: Do I preserve the antique value by leaving them uncut, or do I screw up the soft deckled margin by inexpertly cutting them? Read more>

Flower Confidential

Award-winning author Amy Stewart takes readers on an around-the-world, behind-the-scenes look at the flower industry and how it has sought—for better or worse—to achieve perfection. She tracks down the hybridizers, geneticists, farmers, and florists working to invent, manufacture, and sell flowers that are bigger, brighter, and sturdier than anything nature can provide. There's a scientist intent on developing the first genetically modified blue rose; an eccentric horitcultural legend who created the most popular lily; a breeder of gerberas of every color imaginable; and an Ecuadorean farmer growing exquisite roses, the floral equivalent of a Tiffany diamond. And, at every turn she discovers the startling intersection of nature and technology, of sentiment and commerce.

Book celebrates plant world's 'criminals'

By Holly Hayes
San Jose Mercury News
Tucson, Arizona Published: 06.21.2009

Amy Stewart is fascinated by plants behaving badly — what she calls "social misfits" of the horticultural world that can "kill, maim, intoxicate and otherwise offend."

In her new book, "Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities" (Algonquin Books, $18.95), the Eureka, Calif.-based writer offers up more than 200 examples of botany's bad boys and girls, along with anecdotes — and fun, if sometimes horrific, facts — that place the plants in the context of history, legend and science.

Stewart recently answered a few questions about the plant kingdom's "criminal element."

Please explain your insatiable fascination with the dark side of horticulture.

Read more:

Book Recommendation: How Plants Gets Their Names

How Plants Get Their Names

By L.H. Bailey

Reveals the confusion that results from misleading popular names of plants and points out the advantages of a sound, scientific approach. These few chapters cover virtually every aspect of the subject of how plants get their names and what those names signify.

181pp Paperbound

New guide lists greenhouse vegetable producers

Published on 06/15/2009 03:25pm By Bob Luder

A former project led greenhouse vegetable consultant Gary Hickman to recently publish the “Worldwide Greenhouse Vegetable Producers List,” available now on Hickman’s Web site.

“A month or so ago, I put out a 40-page booklet on greenhouse production statistics,” said Hickman, a retired greenhouse vegetable adviser who worked at the University of California-Davis.

“There weren’t but a couple individual companies listed (in that booklet). I got feedback from customers saying they wanted more information on companies.”

The 28-page publication lists 319 greenhouse vegetable companies from 30 countries around the world, including 227 Internet references.

“I got a lot of the information off of companies’ Web sites,” Hickman said. “Even the foreign countries … with the new technology on these Web sites, you can just click translate, and it will put it in English.

“I already have 20 more companies to update, and updates are no charge to people who buy the book," he said. "I would think that, once I start to sell it, I’ll be hearing from a lot more.”

The book sells for $75 and can be ordered at Hickman’s Web site at www.cuestaroble.com.