A short and seemingly practical guide, with lists of appropriate (to Britain) plants for hedgerows and plenty of pictures of hedges actually being relaid. Even so, half the book is on fencing and gates.
A later and longer book is available online; Hedging, & . Midland hedges - hedgerow planning - hedge restoration - competitions! I knew there were drystone walling competitions, but this seems like an even-less-glamourous extreme and practical sport.
Find in a Library: Hedge Laying and Fencing
Find in a Library: Hedging
Phaidon organized these five hundred gardens by their designers; Aalto to Zug, each is represented by one garden, each garden represented by one small vivid photograph and about three paragraphs of text. It isn't, therefore, much use if you're looking for something relevant to any particular garden; but all the photos are good of their kind, so it's very calming to flip through. Since the five hundred most glorious gardens tend to have been built with lots of space, and lots of money, and often lots of time, it wasn't going to be a utilitarian book anyway.
There are more photos than I would like of a single built object rather than a plant or landscape layout. Sometimes this is reasonable; the Chinese teahouse at Sanssouci is a joy.
I was enthralled by the tiny description of the Quinta de Regaleira, built by someone amazingly rich even by the standards of the Gilded Age and very fond of symbolism and mystery; it's described as "the garden of an obsessive", or "allegorical", and seems to be composed largely of turrets and grottos, or dry wells, connected by half-hidden ways. Clearly a mastermind of ambiguous morality should live there.
These stunnerous gardens don't last forever; war and development took some, many of them require constant upkeep, others were plowed under by inheritors of money but not taste, many are ruins thousands of years old (and still striking), some of them had natural lifespans limited by the lives of trees. I am made the more happy by the Cang Lang Ting:
The Cang Lang Ting is one of the oldest gardens in Suzhou and has been so miraculously preserved that it still resembles the drawing its creator, the scholar and poet Su Zimei, made when he designed the garden in 1044. Carved on to a black stone, which still stands at the entrance to the garden, the plan shows a bird's-eye view[...]
It was moved or rebuilt in the 17th century, but everyone says it kept the spirit of the Song builders.
A significant number of the gardens are 'out of place' in some way, as when Catherine the Great hired a Scottish architect to build a Chinese village and a pyramid mausoleum (for her dogs!) .East and West exchanged styles, also North and South, and maybe the transplants required more genius to flourish; or maybe they stayed famous because they were so obviously made things. The pyramids are a recurring theme, too, said to represent reason and enlightenment but often associated with secrets.
ISBN: 0741843555
Evidently the mainstream US didn't know about snow peas in 1978. This from a Northeast gardening book, so maybe they'd made it into common diet on the West Coast already; but good gracious, what persistence of ignorance over gusto.
Harrington gives gardening advice, simple recipes, and amusing factods for a couple score Chinese vegetables (some could equally be counted as Japanese or Middle Eastern or African, but she seems to have fallen in love in a Chinese cooking class). Many of the vegetables are now easy to find in any Seattle grocery, and the gardening advice is slightly wrong for our climate, but it's a good minor document for that shift in American eating which I think of as Escape from the Iceberg Lettuce.
I was actually looking for Asian collard greens. I didn't find one here, but that faithful and ancient Brassica could have travelled that far.
ISBN: 0882663690
The elder Wolverton was a NASA scientist and is an environmental engineer. Indeed, this book is published by his engineering company and is a tacit advertisement for their work, case-study by case-study. They don't mention any of the competing designs, let alone the homebuilt oddities. For homebrew or humor, try The Humanure Handbook. If you're wondering how your small town can improve its municipal water-treatment system, though, the dead-earnest prose won't be a drawback; it sounds like an educational filmstrip. (I think that's a professional requirement for aerospace engineers. The book dedication implies that he was thought dangerously exuberant at NASA.)
One photograph of sewage treatment lagoons looks much like the next to me, but I did enjoy the discussion of which plants do good phytoremediation in theory, and which survive in practice. Native ones survive. So does water hyacinth. Water hyacinth is famously invasive, and this book doesn't discuss how to cultivate it in your treatment lagoons without guaranteeing its perpetual presence in all your other waterways. Maybe it's already ineradicable, and we might as well plant it somewhere useful.
The discussion of how many contaminants are becoming common in water is sadly familiar. Phytoremediation of heavy-metal and radioisotope contamination can't be the whole answer (you have to harvest the contaminated plants), but it's cheering to think that biological wastes can be more effectively managed than they are. There's a plan in this book for treatment of both water and air coming off a CAFO, which is one extreme need; and a optimistic comment that even a dense city, say, Sydney, could stop dumping sewage onto its beaches by building a skyscraper treatment plant. First sludge digestion would happen in the basement. The methane produced by that would be used to pump the result up to planters at the top of the building, and the water would switchback through increasingly clean swamps in each story, emerging as limpid as a Wordsworth stream. Alarming thing to go up in one's neighborhood, I admit, but not logically more alarming than pouring it untreated onto the rivers and beaches.
Unstylish as it is, I find this much more convincing than the cherryblossom posturing of Cradle to Cradle.
ISBN: 0-9709791-0-X
On being, or becoming, a naturalist; looking at exactly what's in one's backyard, and then working out to the principles that even a slug or a twist of goosegrass demonstrates. The author leaves trashcan lids on his lawn to encourage little animals to nest - voles, snakes - so it's more about seeing as much of an ecology in one place as possible, than about gardening in the usual command-and-control sense.
The author is English; there's a section on American gardens, but the specific drawings and histories are English. Much of it is devoted to using a real outdoors to teach children to begin to be naturalists.
Algebra was once the "binding and the cancelling out"; naturalism starting from a wealth of data, like this, is too; seeing what all the ants have in common, and also how the species differ.
ISBN: 0-88192-578-0
It's nice in a beginner's how-to book to have the author address novices but assume that they're naturally going to become wild enthusiasts. This book has good practical advice - cloches out of junk, when to use an old cheap saw instead of ruining a good one - and background biology both; and of course they're closely linked, if you're going to get into the subject: you'll need the practice to experiment on the biology.
I will, anyhow.
Crogglers: scooping and scoring tunicate bulbs; leaf cutting begonias. (Online info from the extension services again: thanks, government.)
Note to self: fuschia and pelargoniums by softwood cuttings in the spring; camellia by semi-ripe cuttings taken autumn or winter &
rooted on the windowsill; Ribes by hardwood cuttings in autumn.
ISBN: 0-8069-8851-7