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This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest's workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.

A customer from Pennsylvania pays tribute to her patch of French sorrel with a recipe for soup; a Texas gardener suggests gently cooking young fava beans with olive oil and fresh herbs; and a contributor from California provides a recipe for beef medallions glazed with mustard and fresh tarragon, garnished with fresh mustard flowers.

Urban gardens are continuously negotiated, contested, and remade. One of the primary ways that these spaces are negotiated is through the ways that communities self-organise to manage them. Drawing on critical urban scholarship, this article explores the ways in which the dynamics of self-organisation in urban gardens both shape and are shaped by the spatial development of the sites. Reflecting on two cycles of participatory video-making with urban gardeners in Seville, Spain, the article specifically examines how the motivations of the gardeners and the issue of communication influence the dynamic relationship between self-organisation and the spatial development of gardens.

This beautiful book brings together interviews and photographs of more than thirty Minnesotans who have imported the style and tradition of their native or ancestral lands into their gardening. Susan Davis Price relates the fascinating stories of these people’s lives as she explores gardening techniques and plants brought from every part of the globe.

In 1793 James F. Brown was born a slave, and in 1868 he died a free man. At age 34 he ran away from his native Maryland to pass the remainder of his life as a gardener to a wealthy family in the Hudson Valley. Two years after his escape and manumission, he began a diary which he kept until his death. InFreedom's Gardener, Myra B. Young Armstead uses the apparently small and domestic details of Brown's diaries to construct a bigger story about the transition from slavery to freedom. In this first detailed historical study of Brown's diaries, Armstead utilizes Brown's life to illuminate the concept of freedom as it developed in the United States in the early national and antebellum years. That Brown, an African American and former slave, serves as such a case study underscores the potential of American citizenship during his lifetime.

In August 1937 a small group of Edith Wharton's intimate friends gathered to pay their last respects at her funeral in France. Among that small group of people was her friend for many years, Lawrence 'Johnnie' Johnston, the creator of two famous gardens, at Hidcote Manor, Gloucestershire, in England and Serre de la Madone, Menton, on the Cote d'Azur in the south of France. Wharton and Johnston shared not only a love of nature and gardens but also a shared experience of life. Both were private people who had had very similar childhoods, experiencing the loss of their fathers at an early age. Yet there was one aspect of their lives in which they were very different. Wharton, the writer, chose to expose her innermost thoughts and feelings and was continually in the public eye. Johnston, however, wrote nothing about his gardens, hardly permitted photographs of himself or his gardens and, though he kept an engagement diary, these, with two exceptions, have not survived. As a result Johnston remains a shadowy figure upon whom light occasionally falls from within the diaries kept by Edith Wharton. Her diaries also provide an illuminating insight into both her gardens at St-Brice, and at Hyeres, in the south of France. Wharton was a passionate gardener - an aspect not yet fully explored in previous biographies - early in her life after she had made her first garden at The Mount, at Lenox, Massachusetts in the United States, she claimed she was a better landscape designer than novelist. As fellow gardeners, Edith and Johnnie spent many hours together visiting each other's gardens, staying as house guests, plant-collecting in the Haute Massif and travelling by car to nurseries and gardens throughout England and France.In this major new critical biography Alan Ruff has brought the two together, calling upon his lifetime's knowledge of landscape and garden design to assess the influences and techniques employed in the gardens of these two remarkable people, all set against a long-vanished, high-society background.

Grasses and grasslands are of increasing interest to conservationists, biologists, and gardeners. There are more than 300 species of native California grasses and they are found in almost every climate—from cool, wet forests to hot, dry deserts. Native grasses are also important to land restoration as they improve soil quality, increase water infiltration, and recycle nutrients. Their deep roots can tap soil water, which allows them to stay green year-round and to act as fire buffers around residences. Native grasses also provide vital habitat for many species of insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals. Despite their importance, grasslands remain one of the most underprotected of California's vegetation types, and native grasslands have undergone the greatest percentage loss of any habitat type in the state. Grasses are also among the most difficult plants to identify. Organized alphabetically, Field Guide to Grasses of California covers common native and naturalized grasses and, to help identify them, also features over 180 color illustrations.

Packed with illustrations from the herbals, design treatises and practical manuals that inspired the gardeners of the century between the accession of Elizabeth I and the Restoration, this book charts how England's garden grew.

After an unusual interrogation at the hands of the Local Defence Force in County Clare, Keefer and Calder were transferred to a makeshift prison camp in County Kildare B right next to a similar camp for German prisoners. There they found themselves subject to a surreal honour system that allowed them daily parole away from their internment camp, free to golf or cycle across the broad plains of the Curragh without any supervision. This system forbid escape attempts when they were on parole but bound them, as RAF officers, to attempt to escape upon their return to camp.