This newsletter was originally published on February 1, 2024 as part of Living Small’s monthly Living Landscapes series about sustainable gardening. Now Living Landscapes is becoming it’s own newsletter in 2024: Sign up here!
Recently, I interviewed the head of education at the New York Botanic Garden about the Garden’s new online courses. During our conversation she told me that they had designed the classes for the “plant curious” (whereas the traditional certificate classes are for the “plant serious”). I wondered where I would fall on her curious-to-serious scale.
Then this week, I attended Plant-O-Rama, an event at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden geared towards horticulturalists. In a room full of major plant people, I felt very much in the curious camp, but boy, was I glad to be tagging along with the serious folks.
I’ve been going to these types of industry garden events to nurture my garden curiosity and further my horticultural education. Thomas Rainer, one of the founders of Phyto Studio, was the keynote speaker on Tuesday, and he asked the room, “How do plant people envision the future?” and “What would the green city of tomorrow look like?” (These questions resonated acutely as I am currently reading Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City, which I am loving, by the way.) I could barely keep up with my note taking imagining the future of landscapes in cities and suburbia.
I left buzzing with excitement for the green city of tomorrow that Rainer suggests is possible–because you guys, it’s already happening. We just need to picture it on a bigger scale. Imagine every bus shelter turned into a pollinator garden; every tree pit expanded to become a functional bioswale; food forests woven into our public parks; green roofs on top of every school, museum, government building; hyper-biodiverse matrix plantings replacing all our paved plazas and tired turf, homeowners stewarding gardens in the sidewalks outside their homes, wildflowers seeded as routine roadside restoration, and so much more. Does this excite you too? I hope it does because I’d love to write about more of this here on LIVING SMALL.
For my fellow “plant curious” readers, here are a few books that have been an integral part of my horticultural self-education:
The Living Landscape:
Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden
By Rick Darke and Douglas W. Tallamy
I wrote about how Doug Tallamy’s book Nature’s Best Hope deeply influenced me. And as I am wont to do, after loving one of an author’s books, I proceeded to borrow all the rest of his work from the library. For a gardener’s education, The Living Landscape, a collaboration with Rick Darke (co-designer of the Highline), is probably the best because it really gets into translating Tallamy’s big ideas into practical how-tos. There’s also an awesome glossary at the back that tells what wildlife benefits different plants have.
The American Woodland Garden:
Capturing the Spirit of the Deciduous Forest
by Rick Darke
Through the Living Landscape, I discovered Rick Darke, an ecologically-minded horticulturist. This out-of-print book is among the most deeply loved of all my books–not just gardening books. For anyone gardening (or really, just living) near the deciduous forests of the mid-Atlantic or the Northeast, it is a must read. It’s more of an observation and meditation on the plant life forest than a gardening book, but for me, it helped me make connections between the landscape and possibilities in the garden.
Planting in a Post-Wild World:
Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes
by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West
Phyto Studio’s book furthered my understanding of how gardeners can invite nature back into our yards by designing landscapes that function more like they do in the wild. Rainer and his co-author Claudia West champion a vision of nature as a hybrid of the wild and the cultivated–they are not native plant purists. It is forward looking and gave me a lot to think about. Rainer’s talk made me want to reread this one in its entirety.
Botany in a Day
by Thomas J. Elpel
Back when the world was awash in enthusiasm for remote learning, I signed up for an online plant science class. I didn’t do any of the coursework (oops!), but I did buy this book recommended by the instructor, and I swear this book is as good as any botany class.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden Handbooks
I have an ever-growing collection of these little books (and wrote a love letter to them not long ago). They’ve definitely been an instructive part of my journey. The Climate Conscious Gardener, Great Natives for Tough Places, and Going Native (no longer sold directly by BBG) are three particular favorites relating to my interest in climate-forward gardening.
On my to-read list after Rainer’s talk on Tuesday is Garden Revolution: How Our Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change by Larry Weaner.
What about you? Are there gardening and plant books that have helped you become a more climate conscious gardener? I’d love to hear your suggestions.
Related posts from the Living Small archive:
The best small space I saw this week
This one is not quite to my aesthetic taste, but I loved the story behind it:
When Chicago passed an ordinance in December 2020 to allow for new construction of detached houses (auxiliary dwelling units, aka ADUs) on parcels with existing residences, a mom in her 60s proposed pooling resources with her son to buy a property they could and an ADU to and share the property.