Home & Garden

As development and habitat destruction accelerate, there are increasing pressures on wildlife populations. In Bringing Nature Home, Douglas W. Tallamy reveals the unbreakable link between native plant species and native wildlife--native insects cannot, or will not, eat alien plants. When native plants disappear, the insects disappear, impoverishing the food source for birds and other animals.

But there is an important and simple step we can all take to help reverse this alarming trend: everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution toward sustaining biodiversity by simply choosing native plants. By acting on Douglas Tallamy's practical and achievable recommendations, we can all make a difference.

More than a collection of inspiring container gardening photographs, Container Gardening for All Seasons provides a shopping list of materials and a helpful planting diagram for each of the more than 100 container options. Designed like a recipe book, the book offers even the most novice gardeners a no-fail, easy-to-follow instruction format for each container. Gardeners can choose the recipes by season that fit the sun and shade conditions of their landscape. Author Barbara Wise includes all you need to know to plan, plant, grow and maintain a container garden. Fabulous colorful fall and winter container choices are also included.

Houseplants are more popular than ever before--especially with millennials, who are setting up their homes for the first time and discovering that nothing can add energy, style, and that essential "lived-in-ness" to their spaces better than a little bit of green. Whether it's a statement-making fiddle-leaf fig or a tiny tabletop succulent, a houseplant instantly elevates the look of your home. But where to begin?

In Decorating with Plants, Baylor Chapman walks readers through everything they need to know to bring houseplants into their home. First, there's Plant Care 101: from how to assess light conditions to tricks for keeping your plants alive while on vacation, Chapman gives readers the simple, foundational info they need to ensure their plants will thrive. Then she introduces us to 28 of her favorites--specimens that are tough as nails but oh-so-stylish, from the eye-catching Rubber Tree to the delicate Cape Primrose. Finally, she guides readers through the home room by room: Place an aromatic plant like jasmine or gardenia to your entry to establish your home's "signature scent." Add a proper sense of scale to your living room with a ceiling-grazing palm. Create a living centerpiece of jewel-toned succulents for a dining table arrangement that will last long after your dinner party. From air purification to pest control, there's no limit to what houseplants can do for your home--and Decorating with Plants is here to show you how to add them to spaces big and small with style.

In this beautiful and empowering book, Jennifer Jewell--host of public radio's award-winning program and podcast Cultivating Place--introduces 75 inspiring women. Working in wide-reaching fields that include botany, floral design, landscape architecture, farming, herbalism, and food justice, these influencers are creating change from the ground up. Profiled women include flower farmer Erin Benzakein; codirector of Soul Fire Farm Leah Penniman; plantswoman Flora Grubb; edible and cultural landscape designer Leslie Bennett; Caribbean-American writer and gardener Jamaica Kincaid; soil scientist Elaine Ingham; landscape designer Ariella Chezar; floral designer Amy Merrick, and many more. Rich with personal stories and insights, Jewell's portraits reveal a devotion that transcends age, locale, and background, reminding us of the profound role of green growing things in our world--and our lives.

Emily Dickinson was a keen observer of the natural world, but less well known is the fact that she was also an avid gardener--sending fresh bouquets to friends, including pressed flowers in her letters, and studying botany at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke. At her family home, she tended both a small glass conservatory and a flower garden.

In Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life, award-winning author Marta McDowell explores Dickinson's deep passion for plants and how it inspired and informed her writing. Tracing a year in the garden, the book reveals details few know about Dickinson and adds to our collective understanding of who she was as a person. By weaving together Dickinson's poems, excerpts from letters, contemporary and historical photography, and botanical art, McDowell offers an enchanting new perspective on one of America's most celebrated but enigmatic literary figures.

The ultimate color-by-color flower reference guide - from New York's pre-eminent floral designers, Putnam and Putnam

Planning a wedding, a dinner, a birthday party, a romantic evening, holiday entertaining, or just arranging flowers for the pleasure of having them, more often than not your creative process begins with thinking about the color of the flowers that you want. To help you find what you are looking for, Flower Color Guide is the first reference book to organize flower types by color, with an emphasis on seasonality and creative color schemes - and the results are stunning in their sheer variety. What Pantone is to color, Flower Color Guide is to flowers.

Showcasing 400 flowers at their peak, with stunning photography taken by Putnam & Putnam in their Brooklyn studio, this guide includes an appendix featuring perforated pages, with tips on flower care, notes on how to prepare vessels and a list of suggested color schemes. A great gift to give, or to have for oneself, the book speaks to the most seasoned flower enthusiasts as well as those just beginning to explore the possibilities of arranging flowers.

Michael and Darroch Putnam have built a reputation for romantic, dramatic floral arrangements and installations using color as their guiding principle - here, they share their knowledge with readers worldwide: "This is the book we wished we had when we started doing flowers."

The first edition of Gaia's Garden sparked the imagination of America's home gardeners, introducing permaculture's central message: Working with Nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers.

Many people mistakenly think that ecological gardening--which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants--can take place only on a large, multiacre scale. As Hemenway demonstrates, it's fun and easy to create a "backyard ecosystem" by assembling communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions, including:

This revised and updated edition also features a new chapter on urban permaculture, designed especially for people in cities and suburbs who have very limited growing space. Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it's established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that's needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.

The book is divided into four sections: "Connect" looks at design features that act either as connecting or dividing elements; "Divide" considers elements that can be used to create rooms within gardens; "Space" explores different spatial types; and "Styles" covers every type of garden style throughout history, from cottage gardens to today's minimalist designs. Rounded out with a series of useful directories on designers, sources, and public gardens, this is the book for garden design ideas.

Although seductive, flowers, by their fleeting nature, are a fickle base to provide long-lasting gardens with year-round interest. Tackle this problem with the advice in Gardening with Foliage First. Learn how to first build a framework of foliage and then layer in flowers and other artistic elements as the finishing touches. This simple, recipe-style approach to garden design features 127 combinations for both sunny and shady gardens that work for a variety of climates and garden challenges.

Any backyard has the potential to refresh and inspire if you know what to do. Jan Johnsen's new book, Gardentopia: Design Basics for Creating Beautiful Outdoor Spaces, will delight all garden lovers with over 130 lushly illustrated landscape design and planting suggestions. Ms. Johnsen is an admired designer and popular speaker whose hands-on approach to "co-creating with nature" will have you saying, "I can do that!'

This info-packed, sumptuous book offers individual tips for enhancing any size landscape using 'real world' solutions. The suggestions are grouped into five categories that include Garden Design and Artful Accents, Walls, Patios, and Steps and Plants and Planting, among others. Whether you are an experienced gardener or a landscaping novice, Gardentopia will inspire you with tips such as 'Soften a Corner", "Paint it Black", and "Hide and Reveal".

For centuries, plants have transformed interiors, and today plant-filled homes are filling up our Instagram feeds. With Indoor Green, author and retailer Bree Claffey explores the interior worlds of fellow plant lovers and the enduring attraction of houseplants. From the ever-reliable peace lily and beguiling fiddle-leaf fig to the elusive Chinese money plant, Indoor Green makes it obvious that even the humblest greenery can transform a home.

Houseplants add romance to any room. Within the pages of Indoor Green, gorgeous photographs of interiors from across the globe--divided into chapters such as "Plant Music," "How to Grow Fresh Air," and "Plant Portraits," make the magic easy to replicate in one's own home. Interviews of indoor green enthusiasts appear in this paperback alongside the imagery, as well as tips on caring for plants and an index of plant varieties. More than good-looking props, plants are living, growing, joyful things rooted in creativity--and Indoor Green makes it obvious that even the humblest greenery can transform a home.

In Lawns Into Meadows, landscape designer Owen Wormser makes a case for the power and generosity of meadows. In a world where lawns have wreaked havoc on our natural ecosystems, meadows offer a compelling solution. They establish wildlife and pollinator habitats. They're low-maintenance and low-cost. They have a built-in resilience that helps them weather climate extremes, and they can draw down and store far more carbon dioxide than any manicured lawn. They're also beautiful, all year round.

Owen describes how to plant an organic meadow that's right for your site, whether it's a yard, community garden, or tired city lot. He shares advice on preparing your plot, coming up with the right design, and planting--all without using synthetic chemicals. He passes along tips on building support in neighborhoods where a tidy lawn is the standard. Owen also profiles twenty-one starter grasses and flowers for beginning meadow-makers, and offers guidance on how to grow each one.

To illuminate the many joys of meadow-building, Owen draws on his own stories, including how growing up off the grid in northern Maine, with no electricity or plumbing, prepared him for his work. The book, part how-to guide and part memoir, is for environmentalists and climate activists, gardeners and non-gardeners alike.

Lawns Into Meadows is part of Stone Pier Press's Citizen Gardening series, which teaches readers how to grow food and garden in ways that are good for the planet.

With this stunningly photographed greenery guide, anyone can master the art of making your living room thrive. When done correctly, curating any decent houseplant can be just as effective as hanging a beautiful work of art. After all, our green companions are known to be beneficial for mental health and for general health (being oxygenators), as well as a key element of any well-balanced interior.

Lauren and Sophia run the wildly successful nursery and interior-design store Leaf Supply, in Sydney, Australia. They wrote a beautifully designed book by the same name in 2018. Now, with Indoor Jungle, they explain (in layperson's terms) how to best transform your house into a veritable greenhouse. In this sequel of sorts, Lauren and Sophia cast their plant-loving net far wider than simply fabulous Australian interiors, featuring jungle-y architecture from around the world!

For each spread of beautifully verdant interiors, the duo breaks down how the foliage within is surviving (and thriving). Ablaze with jaw-dropping photography, Indoor Jungle will deserve its own prominent place in your new, improved, and jungleified living room.

Moss is an extraordinary plant--it grows without roots, flowers, or stems. Despite being overlooked, in many ways, moss is perfect: it provides year-round color, excels in difficult climates, prevents soil erosion, and resists pests and disease. In The Magical World of Moss Gardening, bryophyte expert Annie Martin reveals how moss can be used in stunning, eco-friendly spaces. The beautifully illustrated guide includes basics on designing and planting a moss garden, and an inspiring tour of the most magical public and private moss gardens throughout the country.

"If coffee tables could make . . . wish lists, [this book] would certainly be on them."
--Better Homes & Gardens

A singular, personal celebration of the beauty and possibilities of nature

Amy Merrick is a rare and special kind of artist who uses flowers to help us see the familiar in a completely new way. Her gift is to revel in the unexpected--like a sunny spring arrangement housed in a paper coffee cup--and to overturn preconceptions, whether she's transforming a bouquet of supermarket carnations into a breathtaking centerpiece or elevating wild and weedy blooms foraged from city sidewalks. She uses the beauty that is waiting to be discovered all around us--in leaves, branches, seedpods, a fallen blossom--to tell a story of time and place.

Merrick begins On Flowers with a primer containing all her hard-won secrets on the art of flower arranging, from selecting materials to mastering pleasing proportions. Then she brings readers along on her journey, with observations on flowers in New York City and at her family's summer home in rural New Hampshire, working on a flower farm off the coast of Washington State, and studying ikebana in a jewel-box flower shop in Kyoto. We learn how to send flowers like a florist, and how to arrange them like a farm girl. We discover the poignancy in humble wildflowers, and also celebrate the luxury of fragrant blousy blooms. Collected here is an anthology of floral inspiration, a love letter to nature by an exceptional, accidental florist.

Award-winning designer Matt Keightley presents gardens created either by him or by other leading contemporary designers that provide the inspiration to transform any outdoor space. Each case study discusses the goal or inspiration for the design and includes a detailed plan, a design checklist, and information on the materials and plants used complete with a wealth of gorgeous photographs.
The book is divided into four sections: Showstoppers (8 gardens featuring a high-design concept but created in an achievable way), Family-friendly (8 gardens that incorporate play areas and spaces for pets and family meals), Minimalist (10 gardens with larger areas of hardscaping and restrained planting), and Plants-Lovers (9 gardens where more than half of the outdoor space is devoted to plantings).
All types of outdoor spaces are covered from a minimalist urban terrace or a verdant courtyard to a suburban family garden or a larger estate.

Over time, with industrialization and urban sprawl, we have driven nature out of our neighborhoods and cities. But we can invite it back by designing landscapes that look and function more like they do in the wild: robust, diverse, and visually harmonious. Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West is an inspiring call to action dedicated to the idea of a new nature--a hybrid of both the wild and the cultivated--that can flourish in our cities and suburbs. This is both a post-wild manifesto and practical guide that describes how to incorporate and layer plants into plant communities to create an environment that is reflective of natural systems and thrives within our built world.

This book tells the story of how primroses became so successful, circling the Earth, adapting to human civilization, and yet holding their own on inaccessible craggy summits where they may never be seen. Bringing together facts, folklore, and beautiful images from around the world, Primrose is a delightful guide to this hugely popular flower.

Hilton Carter's love for plants is infectious... His lush and exuberant displays are inspiring reminders that plants can be so much more than neat little containers on a window sill. Grace Bonney, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Design*Sponge

Take a tour through Hilton's own apartment and other lush spaces, filled with a huge array of thriving plants, and learn all you need to know to create your own urban jungle. As the owner of over 200 plants, Hilton feels strongly about the role of plants in one's home--not just for the beauty they add, but for health benefits as well: 'having plants in your home not only adds life, but changes the airflow throughout. It's also a key design element when styling your place. For me, it wasn't about just having greenery, but having the right variety of greenery. I like to see the different textures of foliage all grouped together. You take a fiddle leaf fig and sandwich it between a birds of paradise and a monstera and.... yes!' You will be armed with the know-how you need to care for your plants, where to place them, how to propagate, how to find the right pot, and much more, and most importantly, how to arrange them so that they look their best. Combine sizes and leaf shapes to stunning effect, grow your own succulents from leaf cuttings, create your own air plant display, and more.