Whether you’re drawn to native trees, inventive garden designs, or sustainable landscaping, the right book can transform your gardening practice. This collection of must-read titles offers fresh insights for gardeners of all levels, blending practical advice with creative inspiration.
Doug Tallamy’s The Nature of Oaks highlights the ecological importance of oaks, while Regenerative Landscaper guides readers in creating landscapes that heal the environment. For those craving bold, personal style, Buffalo-Style Gardens showcases quirky, unforgettable garden designs. Rock garden enthusiasts will love The Crevice Garden, which unlocks the secrets of growing plants in rocky spaces. In Planting in a Post-Wild World, you’ll discover how to design resilient, naturalistic plant communities, and Pruning Simplified makes tackling this essential task approachable with clear, step-by-step guidance.
These books offer fresh perspectives to inspire your creativity and refine your gardening skills. Dig in and grow your passion.
A fascinating look into a vital North American genus by a native-plant icon
– Reviewed by Amy Galloway Medley
This book is a captivating narrative of the importance of native oak trees (Quercus spp. and cvs., Zones 4–10) to our environment. Picture a pollinator garden, and visions of lush flowers in many colors, sizes, and shapes might appear. While spaces like this are vitally important, a lesser-known fact is how crucial hardwood trees, specifically oak trees, are to our pollinators. The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees (2021) by Douglas W. Tallamy, PhD, is dedicated to chronicling just that—all the life that these trees support. Dr. Tallamy effectively shows how essential oaks are to our entire food web by highlighting the sheer number of pollinators that depend on them. The Nature of Oaks gives you a month-by-month account of all that is happening above, below, and around our magnificent oaks. It also includes a practical guide for choosing species for your area, categorized by region and tree size.
The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees
The Nature of Oaks reveals what is going on in oak trees month by month, highlighting the seasonal cycles of life, death, and renewal. From woodpeckers who collect and store hundreds of acorns for sustenance to the beauty of jewel caterpillars, Doug Tallamy illuminates and celebrates the wonders that occur right in our own backyards. He also shares practical advice about how to plant and care for an oak, along with information about the best oak species for your area.
Price: $15.79 at the time of writing
This guide provides practical advice for boosting sustainability
– Reviewed by Amy Galloway Medley
Offering a pragmatic guide to holistic gardening, Erik Ohlsen explains how fostering the health of all parts of the ecosystem—from soil, to plants, to insects, and more—is essential. The Regenerative Landscaper: Design and Build Landscapes That Repair the Environment (2023) will help you create a beautiful and self-supporting space, guiding you away from a sterile yard that requires many inputs toward a more resilient garden brimming with life. While gardening books full of inspirational images are some of my favorites, this is a less frilly guide on how to have an ecologically thriving landscape. Ohlsen breaks down complex topics, such as soil fertility and methods of plant propagation, and makes them approachable and easy to understand. He covers everything from how to install and maintain a drip irrigation system to creating a design for your space. Whether you’re an experienced designer or a beginner gardener, this book will prove a beneficial guide and reference for years to come.
The Regenerative Landscaper: Design and Build Landscapes That Repair the Environment
2024 Nautilus Award Gold Medal Winner! This awe-inspiring guide weaves together permaculture design, food resiliency, climate adaptation, community organizing, and indigenous wisdom that you can implement in your own backyard.
Price: $25.99 at the time of writing
Design ideas from average gardeners provide inspiration on par with the pros
– Reviewed by Joseph Tychonievich
A lot of what you’ll read on designing a garden seems built around big budgets: professionals coming in with a truckload of plants and beautiful yet wildly expensive hardscaping, but that’s not the case with this book. Buffalo-Style Gardens: Create a Quirky, One-of-a-Kind Private Garden with Eye-Catching Designs (2019) by Sally Cunningham and Jim Charlier takes inspiration from the hundreds of fantastic gardens showcased on the annual Garden Walk in Buffalo, New York, and explains how to take lessons from them to your backyard. What makes these gardens so special is that they are not only beautiful but made by regular people with ordinary budgets and no professional help—people like me! Even more important, each garden is built around what the owners love, not arbitrary garden-design rules. This is the one book on garden design I keep on my shelf and the one I’m most likely to give to a friend who wants to level up their landscape but doesn’t know where to start.
Buffalo-Style Gardens: Create a Quirky, One-of-a-Kind Private Garden with Eye-Catching Designs
Buffalo-Style Gardens is a one-of-a-kind, offbeat garden design book that showcases the wildly inventive gardens and gardeners of Buffalo – and offers readers “the best of the best” ideas to use in their own small-space gardens.
Price: $16.19 at the time of writing
Learning the art and science behind this unique garden style makes the daunting seem dang easy
– Reviewed by Joseph Tychonievich
The Crevice Garden: How to Make the Perfect Home for Plants from Rocky Places (2022) by Paul Spriggs and Kenton Seth is a wonderful book that takes a somewhat niche concept and fills it out with ideas and techniques that are new, exciting, and stunningly beautiful. Placing stones for crevice gardening so that they both look good and create the proper conditions for rare and unusual plants to thrive is a complex combination of art and engineering that has always intimidated me. Or used to intimidate me, until this guide walked me through every detail of placing stone perfectly. The prose is crystal clear. The illustrations are useful and informative. The photography is jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Even if crevice gardens are something you have no interest in or have never heard of, pick up this book. I promise you will come away inspired, excited, and ready to bring a whole new set of skills to your gardening.
The Crevice Garden: How to make the perfect home for plants from rocky places
A crevice garden replicates the environmental conditions of mountain tops, deserts, coastlines, and other exposed or rocky places on earth. These striking garden features provide perfect conditions for the plants native to these far-off places, bringing the cultivation of these precious gems within everybody’s reach.
Price: $27.64 at the time of writing
These lessons from the natural world help you create robust displays
– Reviewed by Cheyenne Wine
Do you find wildflower meadows inexplicably nostalgic, and mossy-floored birch forests teeming with mystery? Nature evokes a deeply emotional response in many people, but I never thought to connect these feelings to gardening—at least, not until I picked up this book. Claudia West and Thomas Rainer, the authors of Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes (2015) translate the workings of these natural plant communities, or “archetypes,” into design formulas so that we can create impactful, distilled versions of them in our human-managed landscapes. They marry native plants with well-adapted ornamentals that thrive in the same conditions to create design ideas that are practical, pleasing, and ecologically beneficial in our “post-wild world.” Rather than composting, tilling, and irrigating to transform the less-than-ideal conditions of a planting site, this book suggests embracing those challenges as opportunities to create unique and low-maintenance gardens, with beautiful photos and real-life examples to demonstrate how these spaces could look and function.
Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes
Featuring gorgeous photography and advice for landscapers, Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West is dedicated to the idea of a new nature—a hybrid of both the wild and the cultivated—that can nourish in our cities and suburbs.
Price: $22.49 at the time of writing
Take the drama out of pruning with this no-nonsense text
– Reviewed by Cheyenne Wine
I’ve always struggled with when, where, and how to prune trees and shrubs. I find the finality of cutting off a branch more daunting than any other aspect of garden maintenance. While I’ve never felt anxious over deadheading or shearing a perennial, I still wonder if I’m making mistakes when I take a blade to a beloved woody, even after years of practice. That’s where this book comes in. Pruning Simplified: A Step-by-Step Guide to 50 Popular Trees and Shrubs (2019) by Steven Bradley teaches you how to prune common trees and shrubs, from cherry trees (Prunus spp. and cvs., Zones 3–9) to forsythia (Forsythia spp. and cvs., Zones 4–9) to roses (Rosa spp. and cvs., Zones 3–10). Each entry lists the tools needed, a set of helpful tips, and a graphic that shows where to make the cuts. While it’s not an exhaustive guide, it’s simple, easy to follow, and goes a long way toward demystifying the process and empowering me to make my own pruning decisions.
Pruning Simplified: A Step-by-Step Guide to 50 Popular Trees and Shrubs
Pruning Simplified shows you exactly how to do it. This must-have guide offers expert advice on the best tools for the job, specific details on when to prune, and clear instructions on how to prune. Profiles of the 50 most popular trees and shrubs—including azaleas, camellias, clematis, hydrangeas, and more—include illustrated, easy-to-follow instructions that will ensure you make the right cut the first time.
Price: $ at the time of writing
