BOOKreviews

Black Flora: Profiles of Inspiring Black Flower Farmers + Florists Author: Teresa J. Speight Publisher: BLOOM Imprint List Price: $24.95 Order Link: https://amzn.to/3Jo45sa and https://bookshop.org/ a/79479/9781736848135 Reviewer: Dorvall Bedford The contributions of the Black community are underrepresented in the United States, even in regard to gardening. However, author Teresa J. Speight is providing a way for their voices to be heard. In her book, Black Flora, Speight shines a spotlight on the careers and gardens of many Black florists and flower farmers from across the country. Speight’s book is a collection of profiles. Each chapter provides a brief biography of a Black florist, with occupations varying from wedding decor to agriculture and places of origin ranging from Hawaii to far-flung Eswatini. She describes how they discovered their love of flowers and began their respective careers. Every story is a personal tale of Black success. Speight has clearly put a lot of work into this. What’s interesting about the book is that it shows diversity in an overlooked community. The profiles are full of personality and told in an engaging way, describing what makes all the florists special. Not only does Speight talk about their gardens and business, but she also includes little details like everyone’s favorite flowers that help us understand who they are. Even though the florists are all of Black descent, where they come from and how they were introduced into gardening are different. Beautiful pictures of flowers also accompany each profile to show the florists’ work. The chapters aren’t very long, so they are very quick to read. I highly recommend that everyone read this book. It highlights the work of Black florists and promotes alternatives to fulfill your floral needs. And for gardeners, especially those of color, Speight’s book can feel empowering. o

Dorvall Bedford is a journalism major at the University of Maryland, College Park, and an intern this semester with Washington Gardener. He is a native of Frederick, MD.

Gardening for Everyone: Growing Vegetables, Herbs, and More at Home Author: Julia Watkins Publisher: Mariner Books/Harvest Publications/Harper Collins List Price: $26.99 Order Links: https://amzn.to/36pD74Y and https://bookshop.org/ a/79479/9780358651901 Reviewer: Stacey Evers Like most of you, my bookshelves sag with gardening guides, memoirs, howtos, and histories. I have an especially large section on how to grow food, so when I sat down to read Julia Watkins’ Gardening for Everyone, it was with a combination of anticipation and skepticism. Watkins, the Chicago-based @simply. living.well Instagrammer, could have provided a book that was heavy on color-popping photos and big-print sidebars. While Gardening for Everyone teems with gorgeous photos, it’s also an information-packed volume that I’m eager to add to my personal collection. In less than 300 pages, Watkins comprehensively covers gardening manual standards like siting your garden, preventing disease, and cleaning your tools. What makes her well-organized volume refreshing—and interesting to gardeners of all experience levels—is how she’s updated these standards. Watkins maintains a consistent focus on sustainable practices, like ollas, no-till gardening, lasagna gardening, and upcycling, or the creative re-use of materials. She doesn’t assume that her reader has a lot of money or a backyard. She provides practical, affordable DIY tips and at every turn, focuses on growing in small spaces and containers, as well as in raised beds and in-ground plots. She even addresses inexpensive indoor gardening and how to make your own potting mix, which can be cheaper than buying premade mixes and allows you to be in control of the ingredients. In a nutshell, this book is as the title advertises. It’s not surprising that Watkins, whose first book was Simply Living Well: A Guide to Creating a Natural Low-Waste Home, would write a gardening guide focused on techniques so old that they’re new again. She spent much of her childhood working in her grandparents’ vegetable garden and at their always-from-scratch dinner table. She served in the Peace Corps and pursued a career in conservation and international development. These experiences taught her “the old ways and slow, natural living,” she says on her Simply Living Well website (simplylivingwell.com).

Gardening for Everyone begins with planning your garden and, chapter by chapter, works through the stages of the growing season to harvesting. Then Watkins turns to joy and fun. In the “Playing” chapter, readers will find 24 creative, kid-friendly, and practical projects. Some, like making seed tape and origami seed envelopes, are useful for gardening. Others, like citronella lemon bowl candles, gardener’s hand scrub, and dandelion flower syrup, will rely at

least partly on the fruits of your labor. About 50 pages of the book are devoted to an arugula-to-winter-squash alphabet of plant profiles, with each page devoted to the ins and outs of one plant. In a consistently formatted sidebar, Watkins efficiently dispenses information about everything you need to know to plant, grow, and harvest each type. She fills out the profile with tips for cooking, interplanting, and fending off problems. Gardening for Everyone is intended to be a “ready reference,” Watkins says. It’s not a volume you read in the cold of winter, cozy by the fire or radiator, while you wait for the soil to warm. It’s a companion for the growing season, and she envisions it “being smudged with soil and stained with flowers. It’s designed to spend as much time in your garden as you do.” o

Stacey Evers is the co-founder and board chair of Hands On Harvests, a Northern Virginia nonprofit that teaches people how to grow food and makes it easy for gardeners to donate those surplus squash and tomatoes.

A Rose Named Peace: How Francis Meilland Created a Flower of Hope for a World at War Author: Barbara Carrol Roberts Publisher: Candlewick Press List Price: $18.99 Order Link: https://amzn.to/3MZTrdz and https://bookshop.org/ a/79479/9781536208436 Reviewer: Beth Py-Lieberman As we watch in real time the diabolical impulses of a certain sadistic Russian leader bringing violence and destruction to the people of Ukraine, this children’s picture book A Rose Named Peace arrives with searing relevance. The illustrations by Bagram Ibatoulline depict the pastoral daily life of a 1930s pre-war French family in the same manner as the images we saw on our television screens of the peaceful Ukrainians in those days leading up to the Russian invasion of their country. Gentle slopes, orchards, rolling grasslands, and a blue sky surround a little boy and his cat in his garden, admiring roses of many colors growing in uniform raised beds. In this way, we are introduced to Francis Meilland, who, appeared in Francis’ garden. “An enormous rose—5 inches across in full bloom—with pedals that shaded from pale ivory at the center through creamy yellow to a fringe of deep pink at their outer edge.” As the country faced off against the rapidly advancing German army, Francis hurriedly packaged up cuttings of his new rose and shipped them to rose growers throughout Europe and to Robert Pyle in the United States. France would be cut off from the rest of the world and the roses on the family farm burned so they could grow food. Years would pass. And as we turn the pages, the dark images of the historic war capture the same vivid devastation, and the sorrow, of the modern war. When the Allied armies sweep into Berlin and the German army surrenders, joy is at last at hand. Letters begin to arrive and Francis learns that the roses he sent out before the invasion are now blooming all over the United States and Europe. His friend Robert Pyle has even filed a U.S. patent in his name for the rose with the “pink-tipped golden flowers.” And then Francis learns that Pyle has named his rose. On April 29, 1945, in a California ceremony, Pyle announces: “We are persuaded that this greatest new rose of our time should be named for the world’s greatest desire: Peace.” Go in peace, my friends; buy this book, it’s gorgeous. It also has a local connection because the author currently resides in Virginia with her family. And also, in the name of peace, may I suggest the following charitable donations to help the people of Ukraine: the Ukrainian Red Cross, World Central Kitchen, GlobalGiving Crisis Relief Fund, VostokSOS, and the Voices of Children. o

at a very young age, had a fascination with watching the unfurling of rosebuds on their stems. Author Barbara Carrol Roberts notes the boy’s delight in the “petals, soft as lambs’ ears between his fingers.” She reimagines how this youngster’s childhood was played out in a garden world perfumed with the scent of roses “light and sweet,” and “floating on the breeze.” Little Francis and his family tend their orchard and garden to sell their produce at the local market. Their farm is also the source of roses that are packaged and shipped to gardeners all across Europe. Here is little Francis feeding a goat, watching his father tend the roses, and helping him by carrying in a wicker basket the assorted tools for the task. In the 1930s, young Francis, now 17, is himself schooled in the family practice of cultivating roses. He becomes entranced by the science of crosspollination and sets out to create his very own new rose. His lab is a charming garden shed with notebooks and flower pots and rosehips and seeds and seedlings. You can almost feel the cool breeze and hear the rustle of the leaves as you turn the book’s pages to watch the young man as he goes through the slow, steady process of growing his generations of rose bushes. Until you turn the page to the dark violence of Germany’s invasion of Poland at the start of World War II. Planes and tanks against a red sky mark the end of Francis’ happy idyll. It was September 1939 and “World War II had exploded across Europe.” But just months earlier, a rose had

Beth Py-Lieberman is Smithsonian magazine’s senior museums editor. She gardens at home with visiting deer in Silver Spring, MD, and is the volunteer liaison for the Fenton Street Community Garden.

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The Elegant & Edible Garden: Design a Dream Kitchen Garden to Fit Your Personality, Desires, and Lifestyle Authors: Linda Vater Publisher: Cool Springs Press List Price: $30.00 Order Link: https://amzn.to/37GopHu and https://bookshop.org/ a/79479/9780760372371 Reviewer: Andrea F. Siegel This book comes from a self-taught gardener who, three decades ago, set out to create gardens that would complement her English Tudor-style home in Oklahoma City, OK, as well as her lifestyle and personality. The lovely English-style gardens surrounding Linda Vater’s home match its architecture and capture what she sought. Vater has gone beyond her own garden fence to become a garden stylist/writer/brand and more, as she is known in her area and beyond, through television, magazine articles, YouTube, her website, social media, and the like. Vater’s book, The Elegant & Edible Garden: Design a Dream Kitchen Garden to Fit Your Personality, Desires, and Lifestyle, is not a dry, nuts-and-bolts how-to instruction manual, although there’s lots of information and advice in here. It’s more romantic than that. Your garden, she says, is a living work of art and a way to express yourself in its design, shapes, colors, textures, layering, spaces it contains, and so on. In the book, Vater shares more than knowledge she’s gained; she offers encouragement in many ways—as she tells readers, I did it and you can too—and recounts her personal experiences. Many a gardener will relate to those, as Vater shares the realities of gardening. There are successes, yummy flavors, pretty flowers, and nooks for relaxing and enjoying good company. And there are plants that won’t grow, do overgrow, grow well in a space where you didn’t really want them, and are too needy now that you’re not as flexible as you used to be. Take delphinium, which, despite her repeated efforts, refused to grow in her yard. She learned that it’s not a good fit for her area, given that it prefers a wetter climate—a problem resolved by planting something similar that is flourishing. Or take the boxwoods framing her potager, which, despite pruning over the years, are too big and affecting the potager’s functionality. She is methodically considering what to do about it. Moving—or removing—thriving plants can be emotionally trying for gardeners. Vater takes readers through what inspired her and how she went about pursuing her garden’s look in a climate far from England’s, and creating the backyard’s centerpiece kitchen garden: the mix of edibles, ornamentals, and evergreens. The author offers a way to reach your garden plan, so you consider what you want ideally; what’s a good fit as you examine everything from climate to community; and what works with your lifestyle, budget, and land, so your individuality comes through in the look you create. Beyond offering views of Vater’s garden, great photos also show other gardens and are instructive in depicting the elements of a garden through Vater’s lens. She shows and tells how things like the placement of colorful vegetables, symmetry of a potager design, and views through an arbor enhance a garden’s visual harmony and ambiance. The book is educational in other ways too, teaching about garden tools, soil, watering, sunlight, and similar necessities. Vater speaks to what we think of as good stewardship, such as growing organically, using native plants, and composting. Perhaps most importantly, Vater reminds us that the joy is in our gardening journeys and in the multifaceted beauty of the gardens we create and share with others. o

Visit DCGardens.com for Photos of the 16 Major Local Public Gardens in the Washington, DC Region shown in each month of the year.

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