Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening
Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening
Garden Wisdom: Hints and Tips for Today's Organic Gardener
Good Growing: Why Organic Farming Works
Pesticide Detox: Towards a More Sustainable Agriculture
What Is Biodynamics?: Five Lectures
Wildlife-Friendly Plants: Make Your Garden a Haven for Beneficial Insects, Amphibians and Birds
Organic Manual: Natural Gardening for the 21st Century
How to Grow World Record Tomatoes: A Guiness Champion Revels His All-Organic Secrets
The Gardener's A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food
Growing Great Garlic: The Definitive Guide for Organic Gardeners and Small Farmers
Controlling Weeds: Rodale's Successful Organic Gardening
How to Get Your Lawn & Garden Off Drugs: A Basic Guide to Pesticide-Free Gardening in North America
Maria Rodale's Organic Gardening Companion
The Organic Home Garden: How to Grow Fruits and Vegetables Naturally
The Ann Lovejoy Handbook of Northwest Gardening: Natural Care and Sustainable DesignWhere are you? What plants will love you?
These basic, simple questions reflect Ann Lovejoy's common-sense approach to garden design. Her new book, "Ann Lovejoy's Organic Garden Design School" (Rodale Press) explains the theories and practices of organic ornamental gardening with an "oh- yeah"- smack- your- forehead- with- your- palm kind of simplicity. She has a knack for clearing away the intellectual clutter and getting to the root of the matter. Lovejoy is the author of more than 18 gardening books, runs a garden school on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, and is a gardening and food columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She's an inspiring and inspired radical gardener who believes we need to "get our gardens off drugs" (her term for chemical fertilizers and pesticides) and understand that each of us has the power to improve our environment. Lovejoy calls this book "the garden manual for the new century." I think she's right. It's a step-by-step guide for creating a more relaxed, naturalistic garden. (See the Sept. 13 column for more on naturalistic gardening.) For those of us deep into organic ornamental gardening, this book reinforces and brings voice to our tribe. And for the 98 percent of American gardeners still dumping toxins and arguing with their shrubs, this book should be welcome relief. Lovejoy says design is about creating defined areas in the garden -- vegetable garden, cut-flower garden, lounging-in-the-shade garden -- and making paths to get to those spaces. The plants you choose form the basis for these areas and pathways. Ok, that's garden design 101, but the organic or sustainable (Lovejoy prefers the word "sustainable" but the publishers insisted on "organic") part of this is in working with naturalistic shapes, using layering techniques and choosing regionally adaptive, appropriate plants whose mature size serves your design -- in other words, where are you and what plants will love you? Lovejoy says naturalistic shapes means getting away from rigid military lines and boxes. She says a garden shouldn't be a boot camp -- it's a summer camp, and we need to overcome geometry by utilizing simple curves. Simple is always better in Lovejoy's universe. Big, soft, simple curves are easier on the eye and easier to maintain -- there's nothing to trim into shape.
Borrowing From Nature
Layering is one of the most vital concepts of sustainable design and it borrows directly from nature. According to Lovejoy, layering "means putting plants together in ways that look natural and attractive and that also satisfy the needs of the plants. The goal is for plantings to look inevitable rather than contrived and to remain healthy, visually appealing and ever-changing throughout the seasons." To understand this concept, study the layering patterns of a natural woodland or forest. There is the canopy, or tree-lined top layer, then a mid-height level of shrubs, followed by a low understory of perennials, annuals, bulbs and groundcovers. The intention is not to copy nature but to learn from it. In the Garden, that upper-canopy layer -- of trees over 15 feet tall -- becomes a living wall creating a cozy interior. The mid-level perennials provide an abundant layer that fills out the garden year-round and provides habitat for birds, butterflies and other pollinators, while the groundcover serves as an invitation for visitors to enter the garden.
Every Year's A Drought Year
For California, choosing regionally adaptive plants means going with drought-tolerant plants. And, that's not in the eventuality of a drought -- in the world of plants, every summer in California is a drought. It doesn't rain for a good six months, and if you choose plants that can tolerate this, you've just saved yourself a whole lot of work this summer. You say you don't mind a little summer watering if it means growing some of your water-loving favorites? Lovejoy says consider planting your perimeter (which is farther from the house and takes more effort to water) in natives and other Mediterranean-climate plants that love our weather patterns. Devote only a small section to your beloveds.
No Scalping Allowed
Choosing plants according to their fully grown size will help you to avoid having a "chainsaw relationship" with them. If you want a shrub under your window, select a plant that at maturity gets no higher than the bottom of your window. That way, you're not out there pruning every four months as your oleander continues to eat away your view. Plant a cistus instead. Now, that sounds awfully simple, but as Lovejoy explains, "This really is a new concept to a lot of gardeners I work with." She says most everything in this book is common sense and experience, but you won't read it anywhere else. Maintenance Is Important, Too Lovejoy's premise is "that happy plants make happy gardeners." "If you give plants what they need and plant them where they want to be," she says, "they'll respond by growing well independently." Following these simple concepts, Lovejoy says you can decrease your repetitive garden maintenance chores by 80 percent. The maintenance section of Lovejoy's book emphasizes soil care through mulching and composting. Like all good organic gardeners, she recommends starting with the soil. There's also an informative chapter on what to do to save our pollinators -- we've lost 90 percent of our pollinating honeybees to tracheal mites. Lovejoy provides easy, practical steps for helping bees, including avoiding pesticides and herbicides, and providing bee houses for our native mason bees, which are resistant to the mites, unlike their rapidly dying European cousins, the honeybees.
Ann Lovejoy's gardens are beautiful and sustainable. This book goes a long way toward helping gardeners of every experience level achieve the same. Check it out. I think you'll find it a useful addition to your library.
