Chances are, since you're not weeding, you're reading
What do you give a gardener in winter? Books, of course! Some of the new garden books are cutting edge and some are sweet as pie. The clearest trend among the 2004 offerings is a polarization between a historical and romantic concept of gardening and an aggressively modern sensibility that seeks to drag garden design into the 21st century.
Perhaps no art form has been more resistant to change, but Harvard professor Martha Swartz helped launch its postmodern era with her very first installation in 1979. Her infamous ''Bagel Garden" on Marlborough Street featured rows of real bagels on bright purple footpaths between formal boxwood hedges. Conceived as a joke, a photo of it wound up on the cover of Landscape Architecture magazine and created a furor -- and a lot of rethinking -- in the profession. No splash in the pan, Schwartz went on to become an international design star. ''The Vanguard Landscapes and Gardens of Martha Schwartz" (Thames & Hudson, $90) features 32 of her bold, irreverent projects with color photographs, drawings, plans, and essays by the designer, plus analysis by editor and critic Tim Richardson.
Since the mid-1980s, an increasing number of art photographers have taken the garden as their subject. ''Contemporary Photography and the Garden: Deceits and Fantasies," by Thomas Padon with essays by Robert Harrison, Ronald Jones, and Shirin Neshat (Abrams, $50), contains work by 16 provocative artists, including Jean Rault, who contributes portraits of a royal French garden reconfigured as a prison. A related exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts will be held at the Middlebury College Museum of Art in Vermont Jan. 20-April 17.
More conventionally luscious is ''Searchings: Secret Landscapes of Flowers, Volume II" by Barbara Bordnick (Welcome Books, $40). This floral macrophotography follows on the heels of last year's sold-out ''Volume I," which followed in the footsteps of another fashion photographer, Irving Penn, who featured close-up portraits of both live and withered blooms in his famous 1981 book ''Two Views of Flowers." Bordick sticks with the living, but has an intriguing way of photographing petals as though they were folds of luminous fabric arranged by a couturier.
But now, let's get in the gardening time machine. Paradoxically, the pull of garden history has never been stronger. ''From a Victorian Garden," by Michael Weishan and Cristina Roig (Penguin Putnam, $33), takes readers step-by-step through the basics of Victorian gardening, using records from an estate in western Canada. Weishan is host of PBS's ''The Victory Garden." ''The Shaker Book of the Garden" by Lorraine Harrison (Barron's, $17) contains gardening advice based on Shaker doctrine and, best of all, a book within a book, a facsimile of the original ''Shaker Gardener's Manual" published in 1843.
Perhaps no New England street has received a handsomer horticultural tribute than ''Gardens of the New Republic: Fashioning the Landscapes of
There are actually two new books about Emily Dickinson's passion for gardening and how it influenced metaphors and allusions in fully half her poems. ''Emily Dickinson's Gardens: A Celebration of a Poet and a Gardener" by Marta McDowell (McGraw Hill, $19) depicts the poet's Amherst garden though each season with excerpts from Dickinson's letters and verse that lend grace notes of profound beauty and surprise. This is the ''lite" version and makes a pretty and accessible gift for those more interested in flowers than poetry. But for the serious Dickinson lover, get ''The Gardens of Emily Dickinson" by Judith Farr (Harvard University Press, $27), an engrossing and serious biography with deep analysis of the floral themes in the poems. Both books also advise how to create a garden in Dickinson's style and contain plant lists. Last year, Amherst College converted the Dickinson family's Homestead in Amherst into a museum and efforts are underway to restore the gardens.
''No One Gardens Alone: A Life of Elizabeth Lawrence" by Emily Herring Wilson (Beacon Press, $26) lifts the veil on an elusive figure whose classic garden books, starting in 1942 with ''A Southern Garden," have delighted generations in this well-researched biography. ''Time and the Gardener: Writings on a Lifelong Passion" by Elisabeth Sheldon (Beacon Press, $25) is another choice for bedside reading. In this literary how-to, Sheldon shares useful advice from more than 30 years of gardening in upstate New York, interspersed with octogenarian reflections that ring true. This may be the year's best book for really learning about gardening.
''View from a Sketchbook: Nature through the Eyes of Marjolein Bastin" with Tovah Martin (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $25) tells the story of the Dutch watercolorist whose detailed images of birds and flowers have made her the queen of greeting cards. Martin, a garden writer, records Bastin's approach to her material, including long collecting walks at her woodland home in the Netherlands, her Grand Cayman Island winter retreat, and, most of all, through the 300 acres of tall-grass prairie she is restoring in Kansas that provides much of her subject matter. Martin catches the rhythms of a productive artist's life that balances busy commercial demands with a minutely observed relationship to the natural world. When combined with Bastin's own enchanting art and nature journal entries, the result is a winter tonic.
Gardening encyclopedias no longer have to be dull reading. Among the best written is ''Understanding Orchids: An Uncomplicated Guide to Growing the World's Most Exotic Plants" by William Cullina (Houghton Mifflin, $40). Hobby orchid gardening is getting big as price tags shrink and more unusual varieties become available through mass production. More than 300 color photographs, a detailed encyclopedia of more than 75 orchid genera, Cullina's tips, and his engaging writing style make the book user-friendly as well as authoritative. He is the nursery manager and propagator at the New England Wild Flower Society's Framingham headquarters, The Garden in the Woods, and author of two award-winning books on native plants.
During the holidays, catalogs arrive tempting gardeners to grow new things from seed, but never giving enough information. So examine them alongside ''Annuals and Tender Plants for North American Gardens" by Wayne Winterrowd (Random House, $65). In prose that is a pleasure to read, Winterrowd explains how to grow almost 600 species of annual flowers that he has experimented with at his famous Vermont garden, North Hill. The 250 color photographs don't make the plants look prettier than they are, and the text presents your odds of success and ways to increase them. With many new types of annual flowers, biennials, tender perennials, and exotic shrubby specimens now available, this is the year's must-have reference.
Need a quick diagnostic tool for identifying insect pests? Get ''Garden Insects of North America: The Ultimate Guide to Backyard Bugs" by Whitney Cranshaw (Princeton University Press, $30 paperback, $100 cloth). Through color photos and scientifically accurate text, it describes 1,420 insects and gives up-to-date management tips for the most damaging, with a list of insects arranged by host plant.
This has been a golden age for garden magazines. Boston-based Horticulture magazine is marking its centennial with the publication of two full-color books of articles from its archives, ''Gardening with Perennials" and ''Gardening in the Shade" (Horticulture Books, $25 each). Shade gardeners should also look for the 1984 classic ''The Complete Shade Gardener" by George Schenk, reprinted in 2002 by Timber Press. ''The Grand Masters of Maine Gardening: And Some of their Disciples" by Jane Lamb (Down East Books, $30) contains 27 of the author's articles from two decades, most written for Down East magazine. Currier McEwen, Bernard McLaughlin, Roger Luce, and Patrick Chasse are among the masters profiled.
A love of gardening begins in childhood, teaching natural cycles, patience, and the rewards of taking care of living things. But this may be getting squeezed out by video games and other instant gratifications. ''Dig, Plant, Grow: A Kid's Guide to Gardening," by Felder Rushing (Cool Springs Press, $17), presents simple projects to get kids fired up, including how to make vine teepees, terrariums, and scarecrows, and how to choose fast-growing plants. A ''grown-ups only" section presents the latest thinking in outdoor education for parents, teachers, and master-gardener volunteers.
