Allen Lacy has gathered together a colorful sampler of American gardening writing from Thomas Jefferson to our own day. Among the fifty-two writers represented are such national treasures as Celia Thaxter, Neltje Blanchan, Elizabeth Lawrence, and Katherine S. White.

By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909–2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, Mississippi. From the beginning, Eudora wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that the images were drawn directly from her passionate connection to and abiding knowledge of her own garden. Near the end of her life, Welty still resided in her parents' house, but the garden—and the friends who remembered it—had all but vanished. When a local garden designer offered to help bring it back, Welty began remembering the flowers that had grown in what she called “my mother's garden.” By the time Welty died, that gardener, Susan Haltom, was leading a historic restoration. When Welty's private papers were released several years after her death, they confirmed that the writer had sought both inspiration and a creative outlet there. This book contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty's private correspondence about the garden. The authors of One Writer's Garden also draw connections between Welty's gardening and her writing. They show how the garden echoed the prevailing style of Welty's mother's generation, which in turn mirrored wider trends in American life: Progressive-era optimism, a rising middle class, prosperity, new technology, women's clubs, garden clubs, streetcar suburbs, civic beautification, conservation, plant introductions, and garden writing. The authors illustrate this garden's history—and the broader story of how American gardens evolved in the early twentieth century—with images from contemporary garden literature, seed catalogs, and advertisements, as well as unique historic photographs. Noted landscape photographer Langdon Clay captures the restored garden through the seasons.

An extraordinary amount of knowledge is compiled in this collection of fifty selections on gardening from essays, letters, travel journals, and natural histories, covering a broad geographic range of writings from the colonial period to the present.

Describes Shipman's remarkable life and fifty of her major works, including the Stan Hywet Gardens in Akron, Ohio; Longue Vue Gardens in New Orleans; and Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University. Richly illustrated, this expanded edition reveals her ability to combine plants for dramatic impact and create spaces of the utmost intimacy.

“One of the distinguished gardening books of our time,” from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma (USA Today). Chosen by the American Horticultural Society as one of the 75 greatest books ever written about gardening After Michael Pollan bought an old Connecticut dairy farm, he planted a garden and attempted to follow Thoreau’s example: do not impose your will upon the wilderness, the woodchucks, or the weeds. That ethic did not, of course, work. But neither did pesticides or firebombing the woodchuck burrow. So Michael Pollan began to think about the troubled borders between nature and contemporary life. The result is a funny, profound, and beautifully written book in the finest tradition of American nature writing. It inspires thoughts on the war of the roses; sex and class conflict in the garden; virtuous composting; the American lawn; seed catalogs, and the politics of planting a tree. A blend of meditation, autobiography, and social history, Second Nature, from the renowned author of The Botany of Desire, In Defense of Food, and other bestsellers, is “as delicious a meditation on one man’s relationship with the Earth as any you are likely to come upon” (The New York Times Book Review). “Usually when Americans have wanted to explore their relationship to nature they’ve gone to the wilderness, or the woods. Michael Pollan went to the garden instead . . . and he’s returned with a quirky and pleasing book.” —Annie Dillard “A joy to read.” —Los Angeles Times