"Books Can Help Gardens Grow"

It’s that time of year to re-appraise your summer’s gardening effort. If your garden looks like mine, you have some perennials that were either too tall or too small for that location you originally thought would be ideal. Now is the time to play switch-a-roo and move those plants. But, before you sharpen your spade, may I suggest that you might want to look though a few of the Library’s new gardening books.

“Garden Blueprints, 25 Easy-to-Follow Designs for Beautiful Landscapes” by Becke Davis should be a particularly helpful book as it includes about every type of flower garden configuration with drawings to show what should be planted where. While most of the book is composed of colored drawings, there are quite a few colored photographs of individual plants as well as landscapes.

“Designing Borders” by Noel Kingsbury also uses drawings to show the best placement of individual plants. This book has many colored photographs of the plants and layouts plus a lot of text to describe the reasoning behind particular plant arrangements.

“Garden Color” by Better Homes and Gardens doesn’t employ landscape drawings but it a is beautiful book with many colored photographs of flowers and garden scenes. The first dozen or so chapters are arranged by the color of the flowers. For example, one chapter is about pink flowers, the next about yellow ones, etc. Later chapters describe other types of color schemes such as monochromatic gardens where all the flowers are yellow, or red, etc. I was particularly interested in the chapter on late-season gardens as we are just about there for this fall.

“The Ultimate Gardening Book” by Carole McGlynn is a big and heavy book filled with pictures of flowers and various arrangements of plants. While this book may not be as helpful in designing a garden, the photos and the descriptions of the plants will aid in planning your re-arrangement.

If you have the space for taller plants, you will be interested in the new book entitled, “The Climbing Garden” by Cathy Wilkinson Barash. This remarkable book shows how to create stunning vertical gardens by using trellises, fences, and sections of the outside walls of your house or garage to grow climbing-type plants.

If you are resolute about leaving your garden just as it is, but you love to read about gardening, please consider the book entitled, “Two Gardeners, A Friendship Of Letters” edited by Emily Herring Wilson. The two gardeners were Katharine S. White, the legendary editor at “The New Yorker” during its early years and Elizabeth Lawrence, a noted southern garden writer. When Katharine White began publishing her popular column, “Onward and Upward in the Garden”, Miss Lawrence began to correspond with her to offer suggestions and encouragement. While the ladies met face-to face only once, each became dear to one another in their 150 letters written mostly about gardens and gardening.

Recent donations to the Columbus Library Foundation includes memorial in memory of Jackie Louden from Mr. and Mrs. Jack Fickel and Mr. and Mrs. Carl Roelle. The memory of Jerry Steinmeyer was honored with donations from Lucille and Burns Ellison and Mr. and Mrs. Robert Mead.