Books : Home & Garden : Gardening & Horticulture : Techniques : Urban

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Books : Home & Garden : Gardening & Horticulture : Techniques : Urban

• Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community

  Heather Coburn Flores

  
  Gardening can be a political act. Creativity, fulfillment, connection, revolution--it all begins when we get our hands in the dirt. Food Not Lawns combines practical wisdom on ecological design and community-building with a fresh, green perspective on an age-old subject. Activist and urban gardener Heather Flores shares her nine-step permaculture design to help farmsteaders and city dwellers alike build fertile soil, promote biodiversity, and increase natural habitat in their own "paradise gardens." But Food Not Lawns doesn’t begin and end in the seed bed. This joyful permaculture lifestyle manual inspires readers to apply the principles of the paradise garden--simplicity, resourcefulness, creativity, mindfulness, and community--to all aspects of life. Plant "guerilla gardens" in barren intersections and medians; organize community meals; start a street theater troupe or host a local art swap; free your kitchen from refrigeration and enjoy truly fresh, nourishing foods from your own plot of land; work with children to create garden play spaces. Flores cares passionately about the damaged state of our environment and the ills of our throwaway society. In Food Not Lawns, she shows us how to reclaim the earth one garden at a time.
  
   

• Rain Gardens: Managing Water Sustainably in the Garden and Designed Landscape

  Nigel Dunnett, Andy Clayden

  
  Rain gardens encompass all possible elements that can be used to capture, channel, divert and make the most of the rain and snow that fall on a property. Using the innovative and attractive approaches described here, it is possible to enhance outdoor spaces and minimize the damaging effects of drought, stormwater runoff, and other environmental challenges. Nigel Dunnett & Andy Clayden have created a comprehensive guide to water management techniques for the garden and built environment. Filled with practical, manageable solutions for small and large-scale implementations and utilizing authoritative research with state-of-the-art case studies from all over the world, Rain Gardens is the first book on sustainable water management schemes suitable for students and professionals.
  
   

• On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries

  Richard Reynolds

  

  When Richard Reynolds began planting flowers secretly at night outside his tower block in South London he had no idea he was part of a growing global movement committed to combating the forces of neglect, land shortage and apathy towards public spaces. But his blog GuerrillaGardening.org attracted other guerrillas from around the world to share their experiences of the horticultural front line with him and become a focal point for guerrilla gardeners everywhere. On Guerrilla Gardening is a lively colourful treatise about why people illicitly cultivate land and how to do it. From discretely beautifying corners of Montreal to striving for green communal space in Berlin and sustainable food production in San Francisco, from small gestures of fun in Zurich to bold political statements in Brazil, cultivating land beyond your boundary is a battle many different people are fighting. Unearthed along the way are the movement’s notable historic advances by seventeenth century English radicals, a nineteenth century American entrepreneur and artists in 1970s New York. Reynolds has researched the subject with guerrilla gardeners from thirty different countries and compiles their advice on what to grow, how to cope with adverse environmental conditions, how to seed bomb effectively and to use propaganda to win support.

  On Guerrilla Gardening gives entertaining inspiration, practical reference and no excuses for not getting out there and gardening. 

  
   

• Pots in the Garden: Expert Design and Planting

  Ray Rogers, Richard W. Hartlage

  
  No longer a technique just for apartment dwellers or novice gardeners, the use of ornamental containers on decks, patios, terraces, and in the garden itself can save time, space, and money, while offering experienced home gardeners unique creative challenges, site flexibility, and experimental fun. Author and award-winning horticulturist Ray Rogers takes you on an engaging exploration into basic design principles as well as how to create focal points, use water, exploit the potential of empty containers, and more. Stunning photographs by Richard Hartlage provide guidance and inspiration, as well as visually explaining each principle. Gardeners at every level of experience will find inspiration and instruction in this comprehensive book.
  
   

• Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto

  David Tracey

  

  The term "guerrilla" may bring to mind a small band of armed soldiers, moving in the dead of night on a stealth mission. In the case of guerrilla gardening, the soldiers are planters, the weapons are shovels, and the mission is to transform an abandoned lot into a thing of beauty. Once an environmentalist's nonviolent direct action for inner-city renewal, this movement is spreading to all types of people in cities around the world.

  These modern-day Johnny Appleseeds perform random acts of gardening, often without permission. Typical targets are vacant lots, railway land, underused public squares, and back alleys. The concept is simple, whimsical, and has the cheeky appeal of being a not-quite-legal call to action. Dig in some soil, plant a few seeds, or mend a sagging fence-one good deed inspiring another, with win-win benefits all around.

  Guerrilla Gardening outlines the power-to-the-people campaign for greening our cities. Tips for effective involvement include:

  Finding plants and seeds cheap (or free)
  Handling city officials
  Getting the dirt on soil
  Planting to bring back the birds
  Knowing when to ask first

  Social activists, city dwellers, and longtime gardeners will delight in this fast-paced and funny call to arms.

  David Tracey is a journalist and environmental designer who operates EcoUrbanist in Vancouver. He is executive director of Tree City Canada, a nonprofit ecological engagement group.

  
   

• Community Gardening (Brooklyn Botanic Garden All-Region Guide)

  

  Today, more and more people are thinking green—and there’s no urban activity greener, in every sense of the word, than community gardening. This all-region guide, filled with hands-on tips, offers a snapshot of today’s vibrant North American community gardening movement. Whether you are already a member of a community garden, want to get involved in one, or are just curious, this guide will inform and inspire you. Models include vegetable gardens, aesthetic and art gardens, children’s and youth gardens, and several others. Using real-life case studies from around North America, the expert contributors show how community gardening produces safe, eco-friendly food; brings neighbors together; offers valuable lessons for children; and gives each participant the personal satisfaction that comes with cultivating the land and making things grow. Like all Brooklyn Botanic Garden handbooks, this entry features sustainable and organic gardening practices.

  
   

• Chicago Gardens: The Early History (Center for American Places - Center Books on American Places)

  Cathy Jean Maloney

  
  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 World’s Fair.
              Cathy Jean Maloney has spent decades researching the city’s horticultural heritage, and here she reveals the unusual history of Chicago’s first gardens. Challenged by the region’s clay soil, harsh winters, and fierce winds, Chicago’s pioneering horticulturalists, Maloney demonstrates, found imaginative uses for hardy prairie plants. This same creative spirit thrived in the city’s local fruit and vegetable markets, encouraging the growth of what would become the nation’s 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 who cultivated treasured seeds and pioneers who planted native wildflowers. Maloney’s vibrant depictions of Chicagoans like “Bouquet Mary,” a flower peddler who built a greenhouse empire, add charming anecdotal evidence to her argument–that Chicago’s 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 today’s visitors, Chicago Gardens will delight green-thumbs from all parts of the world.

  (20080226)
  
   

• Garden Your City

  Barbara Feldt

  
  Offers solutions, support, and resources for urbanites who would love to grow their own flowers and vegetables or who want to join or initiate community gardening efforts.
  
   

• City Gardens: Creative Ideas for Small Spaces

  Pierre Nessmann

  
  Urban gardens are always a wonderful surprise amid the concrete and chaos of city life. Gardening in smaller spaces poses its own unique challenges and rewards, and City Gardens is a complete do-it-yourself guide to starting or improving your own urban oasis. From planning the space to selecting vegetation, from maintaining plants to choosing outdoor decor: this handy book helps you through the entire process of creating a city garden. Both inspiring and informative, City Gardens shows that gardeners of all levels can brighten up their urban environment—no matter how little space they have.
  
   

• Green Grows the City

  Beverle Nichols

  
  Anyone who has ever created a garden knows that it is a process replete with drama: there's the feverish excitement of drawing up plans and making lists of plants; the bleak depression of realizing that the plans will have to be altered; the "Eureka!" moment when a brilliant solution presents itself; the grim frustration of dealing with meddlesome neighbors and recalcitrant plants. For Beverley Nichols (1898-1983), making a new garden in a London suburb in the years just before World War II was positively operatic in its emotional trajectory. Fans of Beverley Nichols will find in Green Grows the City the same elements that have delighted them in his other books: the wit, the style, the cats, and of course Gaskin, gentleman's gentleman extraordinaire. Those new to Nichols are in for a rare treat.
  
   

• Intimate Garden, The

  Brian Coleman

  
  Visit ten spectacular examples of economically sized gardens in the U.S. and England that shows how any homeowner can create an oasis amidst the rush and tumble of a busy life.
  
   

• Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in the City & the World

  
  This collection of writings, assembled at a time of crisis for NYC community gardens, imagines the radical possibilities of urban gardening. Bringing together NYC history, political analysis, utopian schemes, poetic accounts of what gardening can create, and investigations into the dynamics of sustainability, community, high and low technologies, and power, this book challenges the “Supermarket to the World” ideologies of global capital. Includes work by Sarah Ferguson, Jack Collom, Carmelo Ruiz, the editors, and others.
  
   

• Urban Sanctuaries: Peaceful Havens for the City Gardener

  Stephen Anderton

  
  
   

• Urban Garden Design: Private Terraces and Balconies

  
  Landscaping is the design of open spaces through
  the use of live and inert elements as a way of transforming
  nature. The projects for gardens and residential
  landscapes, however, express a different complexity
  to their larger, public counterparts. Ideas such as privacy
  and concepts that take the family into account
  prevail over other considerations. The garden becomes
  another room of the house and is used on a daily basis.
  The projects presented in this book respond to a drastic
  renovation in what we understand to be traditional
  gardening. Research into materials, respect for the
  environment, spatial distribution and a profound knowledge
  of the flora are the concepts used to create these
  magnificent spaces.
  
   

• Urban Eden: Grow Delicious Fruit, Vegetables and Herbs in a Really Small Space

  Adam Caplin, James Caplin

  
  James Caplin is not a professional gardener, nor is he someone with plenty of time on his hands, but last year he grew enough herbs, fruit, vegetables, and salad greens in his garden to eat something home-grown and totally fresh almost every day. His garden isn¹t a vast vegetable plot, nor a kitchen garden. In fact, it¹s a very small but lush patch of soil in the heart of a city. Urban Eden shows that a garden can be productive as well ornamental, that it can thrive on a window sill, and that edibles need not be exiled to the vegetable patch. Every aspect of urban gardening is addressed, from choosing a design suitable for one's needs to dealing with wildlife. Complete with a plant directory, recipes, and a generous array of color photos, Urban Eden demonstrates just how resourceful the gardener can be.
  
   

• A Patch of Eden: America's Inner-City Gardeners

  H. Patricia Hynes

  
  This is the delightful story of the resurgence in urban community gardening, describing the rehabilitation of jail inmates through raising organic vegetables, teaching inner city youngsters where food comes from, and laying out an inspirational plan to help all of us world-worn urbanites get involved once again in raising delicious food in the midst of our paved-over, formerly bleak, urban landscapes. This is about making the World a Better Place, about getting our fingers in the dirt, touching our planet with loving hands, and creating a vision of hope for our cities and our children.
  
   

• Balcony & Container Plants (Compass Guides)

  Joachim Mayer

  
  Garden lovers who have limited growing space can still embellish their surroundings with attractive flowers and greenery—and this book shows them how. Plants that are especially suitable for growing in tubs, boxes, and hanging planters are profiled in alphabetical order and beautifully illustrated with full-color photos. This practical handbook provides gardening advice and information in three sections, each concentrating on a specific plant type:
  
  
• Balcony flowers
• Container plants
• Fruits, vegetables, and herbs
  
  Readers will find details on the characteristics of different plant groups, as well as advice on which plants need direct sunlight and which thrive in shady areas. They will also find general advice on pruning, propagating, soil types, plant feeding, and much more. Like all titles in Barron’s Compass Guides series, Balcony & Container Plants features color-keyed page edges for quick reference to the book’s main sections. More than 200 color photos.