Books for Gardeners and Dreamers
Winter is when gardeners—and would-be gardeners—go into dream mode. Yes, there are tasks to be done to prepare for planting, and plenty of greens, roots, and alliums to harvest, but the dark and chilly months that come on with the winter holidays make garden-focused books especially appealing as gifts. Here are some that we recommend.
If designing and building an edible garden is on your dreamer’s New Year’s resolution list, there’s good reason to take a look at Leslie Bennett and Julie Chai’s visual feast of a book for ideas, Garden Wonderland: Create Life-Changing Outdoor Spaces for Beauty, Harvest, Meaning, and Joy (Ten Speed Press, 2024). Oakland resident Leslie Bennett is the owner of Pine House Edible Gardens, a proudly multi-racial, queer inclusive, Black woman-owned landscape design firm committed to making edible garden designs into enchanting spaces that are accessible to everyone.
On noticing some especially beautiful dried arrangements at markets around town, we discovered the work of Hannah Rose Rivers Muller, the farmer-florist in the Wreath Room at Fully Belly Farm. Muller has now come out with a beautiful new book. Designing with Dried Flowers: Creating Everlasting Arrangements (Clarkson Potter, 2024) will show that gardener/dreamer on your gift list how to dry flowers to enjoy all year round.
—Kristina Sepetys
A new favorite on our bookshelf is actually an old one. It was a chance meeting in 2023 in an East Bay garden that brought us face to face with San Francisco resident and Golden Gate Gardening author Pamela Peirce, whose first edition we have admired since its publication in 1993. Learning that Peirce was about to come out with the fourth edition (Sasquatch Books 2023) was heartening. The value in deepening our relationships with nature in this age of climate change is increasingly important, and there are few better ways to do that than through gardening. Read our full review here.
How is a poet like a gardener? It’s that planting of words in a field, the rows, the rhythms, the intended meanings. And words in a poem are like seeds in a garden: Soil, weather, light, time, nutrients, and coaxing hands move outcomes. Since 2016, Edible East Bay has been following poet Gabrielle Myers, who has worked as a chef and farmer in the East Bay, Sacramento Valley, and Sierra Foothills. Her writings always bring us in close touch with the earth where our food is grown and inform our understanding of ourselves and bodies in association with those elements that feed us.
—Cheryl Angelina Koehler
Gardening to Life the Organ
From Break Self: Feed by Gabrielle Myers (Finishing Line Press, 2024)
Our heart caught inside the San Marzano’s first tomato,
We cling to ribs that line each side, each ventricle
Tears as we dip to the seeds.
Our pumping muscle shakes thin flesh walls,
Tries to ignite sweetness and acidity’s trap
That closes in on one fruit.
Our heart dug in our garden’s soil,
Each worm wiggles and tunnels into vessel walls,
Each half-decomposed orange rind smears
Against love’s hope edge, love’s impossible decline.
The Calabrian pepper’s roots web out,
Fuel a thin trickle
Thumping from the worn organ
As it bleeds into sand grains,
Into twigs set to nourish in dissolution,
As it gives to nematodes, to basil sprouts.
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Also by poet Gabrielle Myers;
Hive-Mind, a Memoir
