BOOKreviews
Beautiful Flowers: A Guide and Workbook for Growing, Using, and Enjoying Gorgeous Garden Blooms Author: Janice Cox Publisher: Ogden Publications List Price: $17.99 Order Link: https://amzn.to/3GEtbBi Reviewer: Melinda Thompson Flowers: they’re used for more than just making the space beautiful. In Beautiful Flowers: A Guide and Workbook for Growing, Using, and Enjoying Gorgeous Garden Blooms, Janice Cox writes about how flowers can be used for self-care, eating, and crafts. The first chapter of the book, “Beautiful Flowers,” is a comprehensive guide about how to care for flowering plants and plant them together. In between the instructions for types of soil to use for plants, pruning the flowers, and arranging the plants in the garden, Cox says there is a language that flowers have told throughout history. This guide is beginner-friendly, explaining all the important things that new flower-growers need to know. “Nearly every feeling and emotion can be expressed with flowers,” Cox writes, before listing the Victorian England meanings of giving someone flowers. Some examples include Forgetme-nots meaning true love memories, yellow Tulips meaning you make me smile, and Hollyhock meaning ambition. Throughout the book, Cox says the best part about flowers is giving them to people and seeing the resulting smiles on their faces. The other chap18
WASHINGTON GARDENER
DECEMBER 2021
ters detail the different ways the reader can make something to give to someone they love. The next few chapters are both beginner and experienced gardener-friendly. The second chapter, “Natural Beauty with Flowers,” tells more than just how flowers can light up a room. It describes how you can light up your self-care routine. There are recipes for cleansers, toners, bath bombs, and more. Cox starts with the medicinal and care benefits of common flowers. After explaining the benefits, she explains how a gardener can organize their garden based on those benefits and how to care for the plants involved. The last section of the chapter provides detailed recipes using common garden flowers like roses, lavender, and chamomile. The third section of the book, “Edible Flowers,” explains how common flowers that can be found in the yard can be used to make food or tea. Some of these include roses, sunflower, basil, and mint. Then Cox presents recipes for flower foods, teas, and other drinks that can be shared with friends. These include flower salad spring rolls with shrimp, candied flowers, and lavender margaritas. In this section, Cox makes sure to include where the gardener can find some ingredients that are hard to find in regular grocery stores or where you can find those obscure ingredients in grocery stores. The fourth chapter, “Floral Crafts,” first explains how gardeners can create fun and interesting bouquets. There’s a color wheel chart to help with choosing the color of the flowers. Then, Cox describes different ways to make these interesting, like using mason jars or empty cans as vases or a wooden floral arranger to make simple bouquets. She also details how to make wreaths and use flowers to dye clothes. The most beginner-friendly part of this book is the inclusion of blank pages for journaling. Gardeners can jot down notes about what flowers can be eaten, growing lessons learned, and sources and use of edible flowers. “Creating any number of skin- and body-care products, culinary delights, or crafts with fresh and dried flowers brings a level of satisfaction and joy to any gardener,” says Cox. “Sharing those
gifts is just another way to spread the joy.” I highly recommend this book for the flower-lover in your life. o Melinda Thompson is a senior journalism major at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, with a vocal performance minor and a concentration in women’s studies. She is an intern this fall with Washington Gardener.
The Plant Clinic: Healing with Plant Medicine Author: Erin Lovell Verinder Publisher: Thames & Hudson List Price: $29.95 Order Links: https://bookshop. org/a/79479/9781760761721 and https://amzn.to/3DW8mzB Reviewer: Charlotte Benedetto The Plant Clinic is a pretty, even glamorous, but also practical, if somewhat strange, book. It is sort of a cross between a coffee table book and a cookbook. Designed to lie flat, with expensive-seeming, sophisticatedly bound matte paper, it is a recipe compendium and a glossary of ingredients. The design and layout are both informal and traditional. Luxuriant illustrations bleed over the edges of this finely made “utility softcover”—designed for use in the kitchen. Photography in The Plant Clinic, by Georgia Blackie, is very well-crafted. Dried nettle steeping in a Mason jar is lit in a natural, neutral light, and shot as glamorously as a pouting model. Even modest ingredients like fennel seed, chia, or powdered herbs are photographed with the sensuality of mashed lipsticks or spilled pearls. A simple and soothing palette permeates the book, providing a calming and modern feel. Attention to esthetic detail is a hallmark of this book. The recipes are organized by treatment area (“The Gut,” “Hormone Health,” “Immunity”) and sections are both artistic and crystal-clear, with cleverly printed side index tabs, designer paper, and again, sensually photographed ingredients on nearly every page. Teas, confections, foods, and decoctions, along with pastes and lotions used externally, and “vapor” or steam applications, are all covered. Here there be tisanes, potions, tonics, “oxymel” (healing honey compounds), and “electuaries” (paste-like herbal cataplasms) from entry-level to exotic.
