I’m not sure I like gardening, but I love gardening books, especially in
weather like this. (A little weathered irony: It usually takes a cattle prod to
get me off my home turf, but now that I can’t leave — the hill out of our
subdivision is a bob sled run — it seems I suddenly must have a new comforter
cover and new shoes and I need to check my mailbox at the Chronicle and
I desperately want to visit all my friends and…) To get through these long,
dark Texas winters, I’ve been perusing the following:
The Natural Garden Book, by Peter Harper with Chris Madsen and Jeremey
Light, (Simon and Schuster, Inc.) offers a “holistic approach to gardening.”
This book is jam-packed with gardening history, tips, and philosophical
ruminations, which get a little heavy-handed at times. Like when they discuss
the “language” of traditional gardening: “rich but stilted — a baroque
creation, in which excessive ornamentation and moribund conventions stifled the
spirit of all the participants in the garden.” The authors propose a new
language where “the old vocabulary would be enriched with hitherto forbidden
phrases — earthy vulgarisms in the form of wild and native plants.” Huh?
Fortunately for folks like me, the book is enriched with earthy photographs of
inspirational gardens. I stared at the shot of the rose-covered pergola on
p.147 for half an hour, swearing I would never complain about our hot summers
again.
Landscaping With Wildflowers, an Environmental Approach to Gardening,
by Jim Wilson (Houghton Mifflin Company) is a shot of spring. Wilson briefly
heralds the value of the native garden in the introduction, then wastes no more
time on the “whys” of his environmental approach, instead wading right into the
“hows”: how to prepare soil, how to attract butterflies, how to control weeds,
and how to buy seeds for meadows. But once again, it’s the colorful visuals
that send this flower-starved reader into dreamland.
Then there’s Native Texas Plants, by Sally Wasowski (Gulf Publishing
Company), the Bible of indigenous plants of our area. We’ve had this book long
enough that pressed within its pages are flowers and grasses and leaves we’ve
plucked and identified throughout several seasons: prairie verbena, turk’s cap,
cedar sage, and the still-vibrant blue of delphinium carolinianum. If I could
slip these cobalt petals in my ear I’m sure my memories of warm, green weather
would roll through my brain like a National Geographic special, time
lapse photography and all. Or maybe I’ll spare my eardrum and simply write to
all the individuals and groups listed under Who’s Who in Native Plant
Landscaping in the back of the book and, if I’m lucky, the arrival of my
packets of seeds will coincide with the big thaw.
I’m here at Suzebe@aol.com or PO Box 49066, Austin, TX 78765.
This article appears in February 9 • 1996 and February 9 • 1996 (Cover).