A Woman’s Garden: Grow Beautiful Plants and Make Useful Things

Lovely Greens blogger Anderson celebrates “plants and the women who tend them” in her beautiful and encouraging debut. Chapters are organized into three sections—“The Edible Garden,” “Health and Beauty,” and “Home and Crafts”—and each features a “woman-made paradise,” how-tos, and recipes. “The Kitchen Garden” profiles Deanna Talerico’s California produce garden, shows how to make a strawberry planter, and offers advice for growing low-maintenance edible plants. A chapter on herbal medicine includes a recipe for a lemon cold-sore balm and showcases Giovanna Becker’s garden in Germany, with its emphasis on such herbs as feverfew and echinacea (“Before we had doctors... we had plants,” Anderson writes). “Natural Plant Dyes” shows how Teresinha Roberts uses the array of plants in her U.K. garden to create dyes. Charts appear throughout and offer such information as ideal growing temperatures and edible flowers’ flavor profiles, and there’s no shortage of step-by-step projects for the garden and beyond: readers can learn to dye yarn with onion skins or make a permaculture herb spiral. Anderson’s wide-ranging survey is sure to delight gardeners looking to find a niche or try something new. (Feb.)