BOOKreviews

How to Attract Faeries to Your Garden

AliceAnneCalhoun

Faerie Habitat: How to Attract Faeries to Your Garden Author: Alice Anne Calhoun Publisher: Ace of Spades List Price: $15.99 Order Link: www.faeriehabitat.com Reviewer: Jamie Oberg Alice Anne Calhoun has been making creatures like faeries and mermaids out of copper since 1994 as the owner of Copper Curls Ornaments and Sculpture. Her obvious love of all things magical comes through on every page of Faerie Habitat: How to Attract Faeries to Your Garden. Faerie Habitat is the perfect book for kids who love faerie, children who are always playing in the dirt, and any person you would describe as “whimsical.” This book outlines how to create a good habitat for mystical creatures through easy DIY projects, a connection to nature, and some creativity. The first thing Calhoun does is describe the basics. Calhoun explains that faeries are essentially “wildlife” and their habitats require food, water, space, a proper layout, and privacy. This introduction is especially helpful in understanding what path this book is going to take since, with a topic this unique, it could go anywhere. The book encourages the reader to look at nature in a new way. Fallen logs become a place for faeries to sit while a circle of rocks becomes a gathering place. If your child is reluctant to go in the garden or finds hikes boring, this could be a great way to get them more engaged in the outside world. This is one of many ways Calhoun brings new fun to the outdoors.

Faerie Habitat is filled with easy projects that focus on creating habitats for, you guessed it, faeries. These projects can use objects that don’t have to be bought and Calhoun recommends Faerie Habitat How to Attract Faeries to Your Garden scavenger hunts for finding the materials. The faerie houses themselves can be made from upcycled objects like a boot, a hollow log, or a terracotta pot. The projects for decorating the houses are all easy to complete and are perfect for people who, like me, love all things miniature. Larger projects, which are still mostly faerie-sized, include Habitat is where creatures live. Five elements must be present to provide a good Habitat: food, water, cover, space, and a layout or setting suitable for the creatures who will live there. In this book,award-winning artist Alice Anne Calhoun shows you how to create spaces where Faeries want to live. She shares advice on selecting Locations, making Paths, building Faerie Houses, designing Features such as Pools, Bridges, Dragon Caves, Stone Circles, and Fairy Forts, creating Furniture, choosing Plants, leaving Offerings, and finding Evidence of Faerie Habitation, all illustrated with beautiful photographs. Whether you are a child or an adult, this book will enchant and inspire you. More than 275 Photographs of Faeries, Mermaids, Magical Creatures, and Magical Places things like pathways and fencing, pools and ponds, and raised garden beds.

The smaller projects include a mini bath made from a seashell, a popsicle stick welcome sign, and a clothes line with leaves and petals for clothing.

Each project is just a suggestion as

Calhoun encourages the readers to personalize their faerie habitat, a great way to inspire creativity. Calhoun also highlights the importance of supporting wildlife every step of the way. She recommends including things like native wildflowers for pollinators, bird feeders, and bird baths.

She also encourages the use of wildlife-friendly materials like mud instead of glue and vines or twine instead of duct tape. In terms of actual gardening, Calhoun goes over the best flowers for a faerie habitat and includes a list of great options. She says to focus on flowers that can provide both beauty and functionality, whether that be something faeries can eat, wear, or use as a medicine. I’m sure most children would be more willing to help fill the garden with flowers if they knew their hard work could bring some mystical visitors to the yard. Faerie Habitat is unique and fun way to get a child to help you in the garden or accompany you on hikes. The projects throughout the book encourage creativity, curiosity, and a deeper connection to nature. Calhoun explains how to notice the presence of faeries, shown through mushrooms and fire-

$15.99 flies, and encourages offering notes and little treats for the magical guests. And if faeries seem too “girly,” Calhoun goes over a variety of other magical creatures and explains that faeries keep dragons as pets. As a kid, I was obsessed with faeries and I know I would have loved to make my own faerie house, filled with personalized miniature furniture. In fact, I probably still would. The projects are simple yet fun and the book is filled with beautiful photographs that would make anyone want to add a bit of magic to their garden. o

Jamie Amadea Oberg is a rising senior at the University of Maryland (UMD) and an intern this summer session with Washington Gardener.

Blooms & Dreams: Cultivating Wellness, Generosity & a Connection to the Land Author: Misha Gillingham Publisher: Gibbs Smith List Price: $35.00 Order Link: https://amzn.to/3pPHY69 and https://bookshop.org/ a/79479/9781423660200 Reviewer: Tori Vandergriff Blooms & Dreams: Cultivating Wellness, Generosity & a Connection to the Land is the personal journey of the author, Misha Gillingham, from luxury world-travel writer turned farm girl and living on Bainbridge Island, WA. Gillingham takes readers through her experiences of starting her farm, rescuing animals, growing and donating food to people in need, and more in this hardcover novel-esque book. Gillingham is originally from Los Angeles and was able to work as a luxury travel writer and blogger. She bounced around dozens of countries, staying at all the best hotels and then wrote about them for her audience, according to the introduction to Blooms & Dreams. She says she ultimately found this work unfulfilling and sought a deeper purpose. Gillingham and her husband bought Evergreen Acres, a farm located on a small island in the Pacific Northwest three years after seeing it listed for sale. The book reads like a novel with long paragraph blocks of text and pages filled with pictures in between. The rest of the book details the life of Gillingham, her husband, and two

daughters built on this farm and how they adjusted to this new lifestyle. Chapter 2 is called “Lay of the Land” and describes both the features the farm came with and that the family added, such as a pasture with a barn, “The Giving Garden,” greenhouse, chicken coop, pond garden, and much more. The farm also includes a sports arena and guest cottage. The photos included in the book are stunning and clearly taken by someone who knows how to entice people (i.e., a travel blogger). There are vivid images of fresh flowers, close-ups of farm animals, and cute candids of the kids playing in the pastures. The pictures help to break up the long chunks of text and I found myself gravitating toward the photos over the words, if I’m being honest. An interesting addition to the book is Chapter 7, “Flowers, Flowers & More Flowers—Year-Round.” Here, Gillingham highlights the varieties of flowers available at her farm each month and provides pictures of each. I enjoyed this section because it felt helpful to home/ beginning gardeners who are unfamiliar with growing seasons. However, because the farm is in Washington state, this isn’t super-helpful to our area since the temperatures and soil types are a bit different. Truth be told, I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I hoped to. I just didn’t feel connected to the LA girl who jumped ship to live the life of a farmer. When looking for gardening books (or books in general), I want something I can relate to and use in my everyday life. This book felt a bit too “self-help” and unattainable. I will say, it’s a gorgeous book in detailing Gillingham’s life specifically and could be a fun read if you’re not looking to apply it to your own garden. The images depict a lavish lifestyle even though they live on a farm which feels realistic only for someone with the means to achieve this. Overall, I thought this book had beautiful photos and it was well-written. Maybe it’s the college student in me, but I almost found it a bit elitist and over-produced for a book that’s meant to be inspiring even for home gardeners. o

Victoria Vandergriff is finishing up her senior year at the University of Maryland as a journalism major with a history minor. She is an intern this summer session with Washington Gardener

The Ultimate Flower Gardener’s Guide: How to Combine Shape, Color, and Texture to Create the Garden of Your Dreams Author: Jenny Rose Carey Publisher: Timber Press List Price: $29.95 Order Links: https://amzn.to/3pCRCZn and https://bookshop.org/ a/79479/9781643260389 Reviewer: Jim Dronenburg (Full disclosure: The author is the reviewer’s friend.) This is another book that tries to cover all bases (as much as any single book can), and as such is a good starting point for whatever particular part you will want to pursue. It is a good book for beginners, but also has a lot to say to those who are (ahem) longer in the tooth. Although the book does have a section (the Flower Gardener’s Palette, pp. 95–242) with blurbs about favorite annuals/perennials/bulbs, the thrust of the book is design. The book is divided into A Look at Shape, Role, Presence, and Color; the Flower Gardener’s Calendar; the aforementioned Palette; Laying the Groundwork for your Flower Garden; and Putting your Flower Garden Together. In particular, the book goes into the role of any individual plant in a garden scheme; front, mid-border, back border; bold beauty, supporting cast, mixer, background, edger; and what blooms when. Your reviewer could have used more information about soil preferences for individual plants, but as I said, this book is a starting point. Soil preparation is covered, though. And Carey points out that it’s far better to use plants suited to existing conditions, and to put plants that all happen to want X, Y, or Z together, where those conditions exist or you can provide them. In all, she gives you the ideas you want to start out with, and keep up with, all through the process. She also is a realist, pointing out that there will be mistakes, and that you should not hesitate to re-think, move plants (in some cases, planned moves, where things are deliberately put as “fill-in” plants until others attain their mature sizes, or when something gets large and should be divided), and—let’s face it—correct things that have turned out to be mistakes. Two aspects of the book are less than wonderful. For one, it focuses on herbaceous things, where a more rounded inclusion of trees and shrubs would have been nice. On the other hand, most DC gardens are smaller and this book “fits” that. The other issue is that the book is “stretched” by large margin areas. For the size and thickness (363 pgs.) of the book, could have held a LOT more information than there is.

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That said, Carey’s writing style is wonderful, and the pictures are good enough that this would be a coffee table book if there were not such good text/captions/information. In short, get this book. Your reviewer is a plant collector, not a designer, but I still very much like what Carey has to say. o

Jim Dronenburg is a retired accountant and now gardens full-time in Knoxville, MD.

The Vertical Veg Guide to Container Gardening By Mark Ridsdill Smith Publisher: Chelsea Green List Price: $34.95 Order Links: https://amzn.to/3T7kczY and https://bookshop.org/ a/79479/9781645021506 Reviewer: Erica H. Smith Mark Smith (no relation) started his edible gardening journey in 2009, on his London balcony. After trying for an opening in a local community garden and realizing he might have to wait decades, he decided to see what he could grow in containers. A lot, it turned out! In his second year of growing, he produced 200 pounds of food. He started a blog, Vertical Veg, and the enterprise grew over the following decade. Smith is now a popular gardening educator, and this book presents what he’s learned in an easy-to-follow format meant for both beginning and experienced gardeners. The book covers just about everything you need to know to create a successful and productive container garden, no matter whether you’re growing on a balcony, patio, deck, or alongside an in-ground garden. It starts with some growing basics, such as what to do when and the tools you’ll need, and moves into choosing containers and designing a space. The entire sequence of food gardening from planting to harvest is explained in detail. You’ll also learn how to save space in a finite environment by making use of vertical devices like trellises, hanging baskets, windowsills, and so forth. A long section describes many crops and particular varieties appropriate for container growing, including suggestions for required pot sizes. I particularly like the final chapter, “A Vision for Urban Living,” which offers reasons to grow food at home, such as health and nutrition, a lower grocery bill, supporting wildlife and community, and even growing as a political act and for the health of the planet. There’s a ton of information stuffed into under 300 pages in this volume. But there have to be some negatives, right? The only one I can think of does apply to us here in the DC area; some readers may find it important and some it won’t worry at all. Try this line of gardening instruction (composed by me, not Mark Smith). Plant the mangetout, courgettes, and aubergines in the pots you found in the skip, filled with store-bought compost plus a little extra from the wormery. If you read that without any difficulty, you may be British, or at least an Anglophile. But for some American gardeners, it could be baffling or incomprehensible. The vegetables referred to are what we’d call snap peas, zucchini, and eggplant: not hard to figure out in context. Finding containers in a Dumpster is a great way to recycle (and he tells us which types to avoid, too). We would probably call the device in which our pet worms produce droppings that are great for plants a worm bin, but if I ever start one again, it will definitely be labeled Wormery, and I might well follow Mark Smith’s careful advice. However, I will not leave it outside in the winter, which you might be able to get away with in most of the UK, but not necessarily in our region. The most confusing noun in that statement is “compost.” Smith would call the stuff we make out of decayed plant matter in a pile or bin “garden compost.” What he’d call compost is what we call potting soil, or any mix of organic (and sometimes inorganic) material you might fill a pot with. Don’t grow your vegetables in 100% garden compost! It’s likely to compress and pack down too much over a season, and doesn’t contain enough minerals. Another thing to remember when perusing a transatlantic gardening text is that our pest insects are not the same. You can find local sources of information, however, such as an Extension website. That said, if you can get over wondering why the author keeps telling you about the rocket in your herb garden (arugula), I recommend this book for the good advice and sensible presentation, and also for the encouragement to use all the space we have available to grow great food. o

Erica H. Smith is a Montgomery County Master Gardener whose volunteer activities include the MG Demonstration Garden, the Grow It Eat It program. She is the author of several novels; you can visit her website at ericahsmith.wordpress.com.

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