Garden Rant: Cooking with Madhur Jaffrey

It’s a simple truth: Vegetable gardeners need great cookbooks. If you’re adventuresome in your planting, the most valuable thing in the world is a cookbook that can help you turn that into adventure on the plate. My favorites are the Indian cookbooks written by the Indian-born writer and actress Madhur Jaffrey. Many of Jaffrey’s dishes are delicious stews, yet the vegetables somehow remain brightly flavored within even highly spiced curries.

The taste of Jaffrey’s food is miraculously rich and garden-fresh at the same time. I spoke with Jaffrey in April and learned that for her, too ...

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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: Gardens can be artful, but are they art?

If there’s one landscape architect on the radar screens of American gardeners, it’s probably James van Sweden. His firm famously pioneered the New American Garden style in the '80s, and it’s still winning new fans for its low-maintenance, naturalistic sweeps of color and little or no use of lawn. Helping to spread his influence both here and abroad are his seven widely admired books, including the just-released Artful Garden, with horticulturalist Tom Christopher.

Love 'em or hate 'em? Read all about vines in the last Garden Rant.

Van Sweden is a natural to tackle the subject of ...

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Garden Rant: The vines we love to hate—or is it hate to love?

Allan Armitage has a sensible attitude about aggressive climbers. It’s much like mine. If a given vine is a thug on your property, rampaging over other plants, clambering up trees and smothering any trellis that you’ve put up to contain it, then don’t grow it. But don’t try to make it impossible for anyone else to grow it.

Miss the last two Garden Rants? Catch up with Graham Rice on transatlantic gardening and Andrea Wulf on the founding gardeners.

Like many hyper-local endeavors, gardening does not readily adapt itself to one-size-fits-all advisories, and nowhere is that ...

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Garden Rant: Graham Rice on transatlantic gardening, British music and his next book

Please say hello to Graham Rice, author of more than 20 gardening books, including the American Horticultural Society’s Encyclopedia of Perennials, one of the most frequented books in my gardening library. The encyclopedia is comprehensive, informative and lavishly illustrated, as you’d expect…but it’s also delightfully opinionated and fun, as you wouldn’t.

Read about more great gardening books at Kirkus.

The surprising amount of personality operating here is really no surprise, given that Graham, a transplanted Brit, also moonlights as a DJ for Radio Catskill. He describes his BritMix show as an eclectic blend of ...

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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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Garden Rant: 'Plant Driven Design' Sides with Real Gardeners

At last, two garden writers who give voice to what real gardeners everywhere have been saying for years. And it’s no surprise that the voice-givers are Scott and Lauren Ogden because they’re real gardeners, on top of being horticulturists, gardener designers and scholars of geology and paleontology. 

Read the first Garden Rant column at Kirkus. 

So their Plant Driven Design isn’t another iteration of the Six Steps to Designing Your Garden. It’s not a design book at all. It’s writing with opinions, and as a reader who’s dog-tired of conventional gardening books—both the ...

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Bizarro gardening—not for the faint of heart

Beware. Be afraid. Not of the plants themselves, but of the exotic seduction they represent. The biggest danger with most of the plants listed in Bizarre Botanicals is not that they’ll eat you (though some would give it a college try), but that you’ll actually try to grow them. Eventually, you’ll get so obsessed with goofy plants that you’ll ruin any chance you ever had of a coherent garden.

Sometimes it’s not even the plants—it’s the names:

•Love lies bleeding (Amaranthus caudatus)
Amaranthus actually makes more sense in the garden as a foliage ...

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