Inspired: The Ideas That Shape & Create My Design

Andrea Wulf

The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession

"The Brother Gardeners" follows the lives of six 18th-century naturalists whose shared passion for plants gave rise to the English love affair with gardens. The text paints a vivid portrait of an emerging world of knowledge and of gardening as it is known today.

Wade Graham

American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us about Who We Are

Beautifully illustrated with both color and black-and-white images, "American Eden" is at once a different kind of gardening book, and a different kind of American history, one that offers a compelling, untold story.

Dominique Browning

Paths of Desire: The Passions of a Suburban Gardener

With the same warmth, wisdom, wit, and accessibility that readers have come to love and trust in her monthly column, House & Garden editor in chief Dominique Browning offers this lively, charming, and instructive story of restoring a neglected suburban garden. When a retaining wall in Browning's New York suburban garden collapsed, she was forced into action. Paths of Desire is the enchanting, amusing, and moving account of making a garden -- and confronting the essence of suburban gardening, with its idiosyncratic ecosystem. This meant struggling with depraved skunks and raccoons, marauding teenagers, plastic jungle gyms, toppling garbage cans, uncontrollable eyesores, potholed drives, and all the grinding, honking, and buzzing of the neighborhood. Browning's delightfully frank prose conveys the very sense of being deep in a garden, with all its organic smells and textures, and the myriad joys of deciding what to plant and watching as the vision is realized. It contains a rich store of advice and illustrative anecdotes for enthusiasts and novices alike, as Browning amusingly documents the missteps she took in the planning of her garden and the satisfactions of finally getting it ...