Every gardener’s library could do with a good encyclopedia. A book where you can search for answers to big and small horticultural questions. Like when to prune ornamental grass, how to water your clay soil and what disease is killing off your tomatoes.
Sure, you could look those questions up online. But there’s something more satisfying about flipping through the pages of a big book full of beautiful photos to find the answers to your questions.
Gardening Complete: How to Best Grow Vegetables, Flowers, and Other Outdoor Plants is an up-to-date, thorough encyclopedia of gardening that walks you through the garden and many of its scenarios. In this 376-page book, you’ll find answers to just about any garden question.
In fact, the book covers so much ground that the publishing company, Cool Springs Press, called upon eight garden writers to fill the pages with their horticultural words of wisdom. The authors are Katie Elizer-Peters, Rhonda Fleming Hayes, Charlie Nardozzi, Tara Nolan, Jacqueline Soule, Lynn Steiner,
Jessica Walliserand George Weigel.
Each author tackles various garden categories. For instance, you’ll learn what you need to know about weed and pest control from Walliser, how to design your gardens from Weigel and watering, fertilizing and pruning from Soule. Fleming-Hayes offers information on pollinator gardens and Nardozzi tells all about container gardening. Nolan provides a well-conceived chapter on raised beds, including their virtues, as well as tips and plans for making them.
Gardening Complete helps you understand soil, including the merits of getting a soil test and all about
mulching and cover crops. If weeds tend to take over your garden, there’s plenty of good info on how to manage them. There’s an excellent chapter on controlling pests and
insects and an equally good chapter on controlling diseases. These chapters include plenty of photos showing destruction by pests and diseases so that you can make an accurate diagnosis.
Another fun and informative chapter is the one on harvesting edibles. The photos of produce being harvested make you want to go out to the garden and start planting immediately. There are handy charts that explain when and how to harvest various vegetables, herbs and fruits.
In keeping with today’s views on self-sustaining gardening, there’s a chapter on gardening with native plants and another on water-wise gardening. You’ll learn about installing a gravel garden, reducing turfgrass and planting a bee lawn that attracts these vital pollinators.
The chapter on gardening for the
birds and the
bees covers a lot of ground. You’ll discover trees that feed caterpillars, flowers that make bird seed and trees and shrubs that produce berries that help sustain these winged creatures. To give birds somewhere to land and perch, there’s also a chapter on
vertical gardening.
While
Gardening Complete is intended for serious beginning to intermediate gardeners, even veteran gardeners will find many kernels of horticultural wisdom worth remembering. For instance, it used to be that a standard amendment to break up clay soil was sand. It turns out that the combo creates a mixture more like concrete.
The first chapter covers botany for gardeners, including the botanical order and what some of those hard-to-pronounce Latin and Greek names mean. By the time you finish reading the book, you’ll sound and feel like a gardening pro.
Julie Bawden-Davis is a garden writer and master gardener, who since 1985 has written for publications such as Organic Gardening, The American Gardener, Wildflower, Better Homes and Gardens and The Los Angeles Times. She is the author of 10 books, including Reader’s Digest Flower Gardening, Fairy Gardening, The Strawberry Story Series, and Indoor Gardening the Organic Way, and is the founder of HealthyHouseplants.com. Her backyard is a Certified Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.
