Enjoying That Margarita? Thank a Botanist.

Every great drink starts with a plant. Walk into a liquor store or take a good look at the bottles behind the bar, and consider the fact that you are looking at nothing but distilled and fermented plant extracts.

Many of these plants were introduced to the rest of the world — and into your cocktail shaker — courtesy of some intrepid botanist or plant explorer. So next time you lift a glass, make a toast to the people who made it possible. As you’ll see from their stories, they probably could’ve used a drink themselves.

Drink a margarita for ...

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Prairie Gardening in ‘Sleep, Creep, Leap’

Benjamin Vogt is a poet, essayist, gardener and longtime Friend of Rant. His work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in American Life in Poetry, the ISLE journal, Orion magazine, The Sun and on the website Verse Daily.

Read the last Garden Rant on 'The New American Landscape.'

Vogt’s Sleep, Creep, Leap is a memoir of three years in his 2,000-foot native prairie garden located in Lincoln, Neb. Like his other writing, it’s beautifully and thoughtfully crafted, and I’m pleased to see him apply his literary talents to gardening. I talked with Vogt ...

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The Charms of ‘Cluck’

Years ago, I very much wanted a piece of chicken art by S.V. Medaris, but I couldn’t afford it, so I bought a T-shirt instead. That T-shirt now has a hole in it, and some paint splattered on it, which is proof that I wore it endlessly. Sue (she goes by S.V., but her name is Sue) Medaris is an extraordinary painter and printmaker who has a way of capturing chickens in all their absurdity and charm.

Read the last Garden Rant column on Slow Gardening with Felder Rushing.

So imagine my excitement when Cluck: From Jungle ...

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Garden Rant: ‘The Bad-Tempered Gardener’

There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on in the publishing world right now. The poor economy, the closure of many fine independent bookstores, the rise of e-books—it’s causing a lot of anguish. And there are some numbers to back up the anguish. Sales of all print books fell around 10 percent during the first six months of 2011, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Read the last Garden Rant on The Well-Tended Perennial Garden.

In the tiny insular world of garden writers, the anguish seems to swirl around the question of what sorts of books, exactly, publishers still want ...

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Garden Rant: All About Chickens

I am one of those crazy chicken owners who has more books about chickens than actual chickens. In fact, the ratio right now is three-to-one in favor of the books. 

Catch up on all your gardening with exclusive Garden Rant columns at Kirkus.

Chicken-raising is one of the most entertaining enterprises you might ever undertake, but it has its harrowing moments: fragile, day-old baby chicks and their weirdly specific temperature requirements (95 degrees, no more, no less, or you risk freezing or roasting them); young layers and the strange eggs they sometimes lay (double yolks, no shell, enormous eggs one ...

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Garden Rant: A Conversation About ‘Understanding Garden Design’

What I know about garden design could not fill the rest of this page, much less a book. I’m an impulsive plant shopper; my garden is more like a closet stuffed with outfits I don't remember buying and will never wear. Some things work, some things don't, but trust me:  it is all chance.

Read the last Garden Rant on At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. 

But Genevieve Schmidt of North Coast Gardening is not only a garden designer, but a blogger and an avid reader. She's designed many beautiful gardens around town, and she's always ...

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Garden Rant: Tropical Plant Lust

At some point in every gardener’s life comes a longing for a conservatory. I’m not sure what brings this on. I’d say that it was middle age, but I think age is more a correlation than a cause. For me, the longing for a conservatory began when I spent a night in a French countryside home that had what our hostess called “a winter room”—a glassed-in room that held citrus trees, tropical plants, tender perennials that required shelter in the winter but otherwise lived outside in a courtyard, and an aviary filled with tiny, brilliantly colored ...

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Garden Rant: The 'Founding Gardeners'

Andrea Wulf follows up The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire, and the Birth of an Obsession with a book about America’s Founding Fathers, Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation.

Read more Best of 2011 Nonfiction.

I met Andrea at Petersham Nurseries in Surrey in the fall of 2010. It’s an extraordinarily elegant garden center that seems like it’s been there for 300 years—exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find in the English countryside. You can even have your afternoon tea there. It occurred to me, as Andrea ...

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