We’re turning the page from summer to fall, here at Destination: Books. Instructional books about growing vegetables like The Whole Okra, Epic Tomatoes and Square Foot Gardening forfeit shelf space to more off-season fanfare such as Year-Round Indoor Gardening, Plants Are My Favorite People. and A Sand County Almanac.
In Year-Round Indoor Gardening, Peter Burke provides convincing instructions on how you can grow your own ingredients for healthy, tasty salads year-round. His methods are low-tech, low impact and do not require grow lights or even a window with southern exposure. With an abundance of color photographs and drawings he shows how you can fight off the moody blue feelings that can crop up at the end of the gardening season.
When your outdoor gardening activities are limited, one can pivot to house plants. In Plants Are My Favorite People, Alessia Resta provides a colorful guide and inspiration to turning your living space to an indoor arboretum. (She keeps 200 plants in her 750 square foot New York City apartment). Not only does she cover the basics of determining what mix of plants and involvement best suits you, but she includes how-tos on repotting, pest control, and fertilizing. She includes a list of 26 popular house plants that can get you started in the right direction.
A Sand County Almanac's -- That Rare Combination
A Sand County Almanac is the 1948 Aldo Leopold classic that now includes a new introduction by Barbara Kingsolver. It hits a Destination: Books' sweet spot -- a book that intersects good writing, with natural world and environmental themes, and travel (to different places and time.) The first part of Leopold’s book chronicles a year on his farm in Wisconsin and it is filled with simple but poignant observations. For example, in the entry "February,", Leopold is forced to cut down a nearly century-old oak tree fatally damaged by lighting. As he saws through the tree he ruminates on the ecological history of the state:
"Now our saw bites into the 1920's, the Babbittian decade when everything grew bigger and better in heedlessness and arrogance--until 1929, when stock markets crumpled. If the oak heard them fall, its wood gives no sign. Nor did it heed the Legislature's several protestations of love for trees: A National Forest and a forest-crop law in 1927, a great refuge on the Upper Mississippi bottomlands in 1924, and a new forest policy in 1921. Neither did it notice the demise of the state's last marten in 1925, nor the arrival of its first starling in 1923.
In March 1922, the Big Sheet tore the neighboring elms limb from limb, but there is no sign of damage to our tree. What is a ton of ice, more or less, to a good oak?
Rest! cries the chief sawyer, and we pause for breath."
Part Two are short sketches from Leopold’s life (1886-1948) in the Midwest where he grew up, and travels in Canada and the Southwest. Before he settled permanently in Wisconsin, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in New Mexico and Arizona.
The final third of the book includes four essays summarizing how we to change our thinking about natural world. Kingsolver describes one of the essays “The Last Ethic” as a “classic classroom text and the manifesto of a movement.”
Return to Freedom Farmer's Market
Destination: Books will be at the Freedom Farmer's Market at the Carter Center on Saturday morning, September 17th. We were rained out last week, but we'll be back with our partners from the Carlos Museum Bookshop with plenty of new titles and ready to chat about books.