March 09, 2006
Catalogs
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By now, we at Citygardenguide have an impressive collection of plant catalogs, they have been arriving since Christmas and we have been perusing them for almost that long. But have we ordered anything yet? No! We are still trying to winnow our list to a reasonable length. Our eyes are always bigger than our garden. There is also the problem of design vs. desire. We desire every bizarre, beautiful or rare introduction we read about- but our gardens really call for design with more restraint, discipline and control.
Over the years we have come to rely on a handful of catalogs whose offerings are so appealing year after year that we can't resist them. For the most part they represent smaller specialty nurseries. Often they use delicate line drawings instead of expensive photos to illustrate their offerings. And they all have chatty informative essays about garden doings that make you feel that you are part of their larger gardening family. It's not uncommon to get a handwritten note with your order if there has been some problem or substitution. Most of these nurseries have extensive online catalogs as well. But we would rather crawl into bed with a pencil and an old-fashioned paper catalog than fall asleep over our PowerBooks.
These are our favorite Catalogs:
Digging Dog Nursery
P.O. Box 471
Albion, CA 95401
www.avantgardensne.com
Its annuals and tender perennial sections are really exceptional. Especially useful for creating unusual combinations for pots.
High Country Gardens
2902 Rufina Street
Santa Fe, NM 87507-2929
www.songsparrow.com
Song Sparrow doesn't have the cozy charm of some of the more artisanal nurseries, but it has an excellent selection of plants, all grown in Wisconsin so they are reliably hardy here. It also has a world famous peony breeding program and a vast selection of peonies.
Heronswood Nursery
7530 NE 288th Street
Kingston WA 98346
www.SingingSpringsNursery.com
This nursery has a fabulous collection of tender (here) salvias, and a pretty fine range of those uncommon tender plants that are so fashionable now. This is the kind of nursery where they will send you an extra plant if they don’t think the one you ordered looks healthy enough.
Roslyn Nursery, Inc.
211 Burrs Lane
Dix Hills, NY 11746
www.forestfarm.com
If by any chance you can’t find what you need at Roslyn, go to Forest Farm. Its catalog is substantial and encyclopedic. Its further away (Oregon vs. Long Island), but we have always had very good service from them, and you can generally find the obscure variety of whatever that you are looking for.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)
March 07, 2006
City Trees
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Most of the year, we walk past the great trees in our city parks without much sense of their shape and structure. But in fact winter is the best time to really see and admire our trees, before their leaves obscure their shape--like this elegant, vase-shaped elm on the east side of the Great Lawn.The European beech has massive silver branches, that are almost entirely invisible when the tree is in leaf. Other than shape, look at the bark of trees--the mottled light-brown-and-tan bark of the sycamore stands out against the dark trunks of most other trees; the peeling bark of the kousa dogwoods and Heritage birches create interesting, multi-colored trunks. An excellent guide to all our city trees can be found in almost any bookstore: Edward Sibley Barnard's New York City Trees: A Field Guide for the Metropolitan Area.. Get yourselves a copy and go out for a walk on a mild end-of-winter day.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)
January 18, 2006
Tempting Tropicals: 175 Irresistible Indoor Plants
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This is the book for all of us who have tried to grow something indoors and failed for one reason or another. And we are not talking here about philodendrons and ivy. Zachos throws the door open to all sorts of exotics, plants whose names summon up great pleasure: jasmine, passion flower, frangipani; and plants whose names just make you scratch your head: baseball plant, fire flash, purple waffle. Along with excellent chapters on light, water, grooming, diseases and pests, and feeding, Zachos describes each plant's very specific growing requirements. You get the sense that these are all based on close, first-hand observation and experience. The book manages to be both a useful reference book (and we are always looking for truly useful garden books) and a handsome gift.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)
June 13, 2005
The Adventurous Gardener: Where to Buy the Best Plants in New York and New Jersey
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If you have a car and feel like getting out of the city for the day or the weekend, there are many wonderful nurseries within easy reach of the city, and Ruah Donnelly has written up a fine selection that could easily occupy most of your summer weekends--from the tiny, homey Bumps & Co. (Anne Raver's a big fan) to the sprawling Matterhorn, which has evolved over the years into a destination garden center. Each one of the very well-written entries is full of information about plants and people and includes driving directions as well as listings of nearby attractions, which are a brilliant addition. Just think of it, you get to spend hours at Woodside Nursery in Bridgeton, New Jersey, admiring cutting-edge daylilies, while you send your family off to for river views and terrific crab cakes at the nearby Toadfish Bar and Grille. The possibilities are endless! Excellent maps and the index of plant resources at the back will help make your trip-planning easy. Although this would be a great book to add to your personal library, the good design and fine woodcuts makes it a great summer house present.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2005
How-To Books
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People who have never had a garden are often at a loss to know how to start one and surprisingly anxious about the process. Fear of failure--"But I might kill a plant"--seems to be a big part of the problem. True gardeners know that plants die all the time, and one of the peculiar joys of the pastime is taking advantage of your failures to try out something new. The biggest fear when you take up gardening is not that you might have a black thumb, but that you might develop a dangerous and often expensive addiction to new plants.
For all those would-be gardeners who don't know quite where to start there are two new books, both by well-known New York gardeners, aimed squarely at beginners. Garden Your City by Barbara Hobens Felt is an appealing and sensible how-to book for aspiring urban gardeners. It covers everything from where--a window box, a fire escape, a roof, the neighboring building's tree pit--to how--hard work and determination. Ms. Felt is a community gardener and is particularly good on the nuts and bolts of urban gardening. She starts at the beginning; make sure you have permission to garden from the legal owner of the land, check for a water source, observe the sun and shade pattern of your site. There is a demystifying section on starting plants from seed and a good list of easy plants for beginners. She goes on to more complicated projects like creating a compost pile and building a pond. The directions are simple and the tone is confidence-building. YOU can do this. This is the ideal book for neophyte urban gardeners, whether confronting a postage-stamp backyard or a derelict lot in need of beautification. The design is also friendly and approachable with clear but gently humorous line drawings that are much more effective than the photographs.
Although it will be useful to city gardeners everywhere, this is really a New York book. The problems she describes while universal, have particular resonance here. Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe wrote the introduction, and the author, a garden activist, started her gardening career in Hell's Kitchen at the Clinton Community Garden, one of the city's oldest and most beautiful community gardens.
A more general work is How to Get Started in Northeast Gardening, by Darryl Trout with Rob Proctor. Trout is a well-known garden writer and lecturer from Queens. This is part of a "First Garden" series and is geared more to the suburbs. It, too, starts with the premise that the reader knows less than nothing about the subject and leads them through the first steps of establishing a garden. There is a useful section called "Plants for Success," which describes a number of plants that are particularly suited to our area and includes good photographs and cultural requirements. The list, while not encyclopedic, will definitely get a new gardener started.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 09:06 AM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2005
Keith Corlett
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Keith Corlett has a genius for transforming small, urban spaces into sophisticated, perfectly proportioned gardens. We first saw his work on a rather formal terrace in Greenwich Village, but then discovered him again at the Children's Storefront School and, down 129th Street, the Ricardo O'Gorman pre-school, where he had created elegant yet friendly and playful little gardens where children and adults could feel equally at home. More recently, Corlett has re-designed the Biblical Garden at St. John the Divine. And now we have his book, which promises to tell us how to practice the art of illusion from backyards to balconies to rooftops. Illustrated with many photographs (Corlett's own) and helpful design drawings, Corlett turns us all into urban garden designers, ready to tackle even the most difficult spaces.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)
March 29, 2005
Contemporary Photography and the Garden: Deceits & Fantasies
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At last, a book of garden photographs that moves beyond, way beyond, tasteful plant combinations and pleasing vistas. "Contemporary Photography and the Garden: Deceits & Fantasies" displays the work of 16 artists who have taken the garden as a subject. The photographs range from Geoffrey James's moody, haunting black-and-white images of Italian gardens, to Linda Hackett's softly focused Alium Gigantum (the cover photograph), to the vivid but creepy pictures of New York artist Gregory Crewdson. While many of these photographs are almost unbearably beautiful, they are all the work of contemporary artists, and there is a world of difference between their vision, and the usual output of shelter magazines and most garden books. It is good to remind ourselves that the garden as a work of art or as inspiration for a work of art can be more than a cliche.
Sadly, the accompanying exhibition organized by Thomas Paddon for the American Federation of the Arts will not be shown in New York. The show is at the Middlebury College Museum of Art until April 17th, when it moves to The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, where you can see it from May 22 to July 17. From Southampton it travels to Columbia, South Carolina and then to the Tacoma Art Museum. Fortunately for those who can't make any of the venues, the book is terrific and in addition to the photographs, features several excellent essays; a thoughtful introductory piece by Mr. Paddon as well as essays by artists Shirin Nishat, Ronald Jones and Robert Harrison.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 05:21 PM | Comments (0)
March 19, 2005
Little and Lewis
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Celebrated artists and gardeners, George Little and David Lewis, are known for their concrete sculptures and installations and their stunning Puget Sound garden. Their brand-new book, 'A Garden Gallery: The Plants, Art, and Hardscape of Little and Lewis,' is a treasure trove of their ideas clearly laid out for home gardeners. This handsome, glossy book offers "inspiration and encourages gardeners to use imagination and take risks." The authors would no doubt enjoy visiting the community gardens on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, because in fact those gardeners have been doing their own version of Little and Lewis's style for over thirty years. So, if you look at 'A Garden Gallery' and are interested in figuring out how to combine art and garden design, found objects and excellent plants, make a beeline for the Lower East Side and feast your eyes.
Link: Timber Press
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 10:25 PM | Comments (0)
Green Roofs
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Earth Pledge, the New York City based environmental group, has just come out with an exciting new book on green roofs. Using examples from around the world, 'Green Roofs: Ecological Design and Construction' makes the case for elegant, innovative, green roof solutions to some of our environmental problems. These lavishly illustrated projects from countries as distant as Japan and Sweden bring home how far green roof technology has come in the past few years. The Europeans and Japanese seem to be ahead of us in both numbers and sophistication of roofs. But with the prospect that the expanded Javits Convention Center is going to have the largest green roof in the country, New York may be catching up. It could be time for all of us to get on the bandwagon and vegetate our own roofs. To see what that might look like, go to the website for Greening Gotham, which has, along with some great information on the subject, an engaging little bit of animation which lets you "green" up some Manhattan roofs.
Link: Earth Pledge
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 10:04 PM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2005
Plant Hunting, Past and Present
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Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya
by Jamaica Kincaid, National Geographic Society
Sex, Botany & Empire
by Patricia Fara, Columbia University Press
Plants from the Edge of the World
by Mark Flanagan and Tony Kirkham, Timber Press
The Jade Garden
Peter Wharton, Brent Hine, Douglas Justice, Timber Press (publication date June 15)
To anyone familiar with the Heronswood catalogue it is clear that we are in the midst of a new era of intensive plant hunting and collecting "From high elevations in the enchanting valley of Topke Gola in far NE Nepal we collected seed from..." and there are several recently out or soon to be published books focused on plant hunters both past and present.
Sex Botany and Empire is a delightful little book that considers the impact of both Linneaus and Joseph Banks on the wider culture of their times. Plants from the Edge of the World follows modern day plant hunters from Britain's Royal Horticultural Society as they explore the east for new and unusual species and varieties. The Jade Garden picks up the story by describing the garden worthiness of many recent plant introductions from the Asia. This 21st century plant hunting is also inspiring literature;
Jamaica Kincaid has written a poetic travelogue of her plant hunting trip to Nepal with Dan Hinkley, of Heronswood Nursery and Catalogue called Among the Flowers, a walk in the Himalaya.
A Rage for Rock Gardening:
The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector
By Nicola Shulman, Godine
Although the rarified world of Alpines is way too complex and obscure for the lay person to penetrate, this biography of the famed rock gardener and plant collector gives an entertaining portrait of one man's obsession. Farrer introduced to the West hundreds of plants--all those with Farreri after them--we cherish today. This was first published in paperback in 2003 and came out in hardback last October. James Fenton just gave it an excellent review in the New York Review of Books.
So where did our recent collective obsession with native plants go? A few years ago we were all designing with native plants, creating native plant gardens, and virtuously preserving indigeneous species. Can these worthy tendencies coexist with the romantic lure of the new and exotic?
Posted by gardenguidenyc at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)