Matthews Library Recommends: Gardening Inspiration in Book Form
Spring has officially sprung and the weather is finally starting to reflect that! Celebrate Spring by getting out in your garden. You’ll find tips, tricks, inspiration and more from these great titles available from Charlotte Mecklenburg Library:
Outdoor Gardening
Get advice from one of America’s most creative gardeners in 101 Gardening Hacks: Eco-Friendly Solutions to Improve Any Garden by Shawna Coronado.
Ever heard of no-dig gardening? You’ll be hooked after you read Organic Gardening the Natural No-Dig Way by Charles Dowding.
Get landscape design inspiration from Gardentopia: Design Basics for Creating Beautiful Outdoor Spaces by Jan Johnsen.
You’ll be turning your dinner scraps into new plants after you read No-Waste Kitchen Gardening: Regrow Your Leftover Greens, Stalks, Seeds, and More by Katie Elzer-Peters.
Tour the stunning gardens of a renowned British institution in Oxford College Gardens by Tim Richardson and Andrew Lawson.
Indoor Gardening
Indoor gardening is wonderful because we can do it year-round! Learn more from these titles:
Your indoor plants will be thriving after you read How to Raise a Plant and Make It Love You Back by Morgan Doane.
Everything you need to know to make your orchid happy is in Happy Orchid by Sara Rittershausen!
Learn how a spray bottle and a little sunlight can bring your indoor space to life in Living with Air Plants: A Beginner’s Guide to Growing and Displaying Tillandsia by Yoshiharu Kashima.
Adult Fiction
Novels more your thing? We’ve got great fiction that involves gardening:
A young widow’s grief is eased as she discovers a love of vegetable gardening in The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman.
Science teacher and rose breeder Gal Garner learns lessons in love when she cares for her estranged teenage niece in The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns by Margaret Dilloway.
Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen is the first novel in a series about the Waverly family, who tend their magical garden in Bascom, North Carolina.
The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton is an intergenerational family saga that will take you from Australia to England’s Cornish coast.
For Young Readers
Share the joy of gardening and flowers with your kids with these titles:
Kids learn to grow the vegetables they will use to make delicious dishes in Plant, Cook, Eat: A Children’s Cookbook by Joe Archer.
Bloom Boom! by April Pulley Sayre is a celebration of springtime!
There is so much activity, from burrowing animals to sprouting leaves, in Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner.
Learn how planting flowers can transform a gray city in The Curious Garden by Peter Brown.
Lola’s parents show her how to tend her seeds in Lola Plants a Garden by Anna McQuinn.
Enjoy a mother and child planting their flower garden in Lois Ehlert’s classic Planting a Rainbow.
In Caldecott Honor-winning classic The Gardener by Sarah Stewart, Lydia Grace gains the love of gardening in spite of having to move to the city.