BOOKreviews
Digging and Delighted: Live Your Best Gardening Life Authors: Carol J. Michel Publisher: Gardenangelist Books List Price: $14.99 Order Link: https://amzn.to/2Zha1S1 Reviewer: Charlotte Crook Carol J. Michel’s book of essays, Digging and Delighted is an easy, yet engaging read, with a conversational blend of warm humor and encouragement for gardeners of all skill levels. The reader immediately gets a sense of who the author is. Michel wants you to think of her as “your eccentric gardening aunt,” who will guide you to becoming a great gardener. In reading her latest book of humor essays, the comparison holds true. Digging and Delighted, released in August 2021, is a shame-free, lighthearted book of advice that will get you through a hard day in the garden—or just give you a laugh. Michel provides every gardener, regardless of their level of experience and resources, with advice to reach their fullest potential. This book will help you, as Michel puts it, “Live your best gardening life!” Although Michel is from Indiana, her book is purposefully adaptable to all gardeners. She encourages her audience to find local resources, experiment, and start from a place that feels suited to their comfort level. She 18
WASHINGTON GARDENER
OCTOBER 2021
emphasizes building a community out of gardening and how much fun it can be to be a part of, while sprinkling in humor and anecdotes that light up the pages. Michel makes it a point that her book is meant to be a take-it-anywhere type of read. Essays you can read a few pages of, set down, and then come back to later. If that’s not your style, the essays are still cohesive and make sense in one read-through. This book is helpful and informational but not overly scientific. It is digestible, easy to understand in a way that is always engaging. Chapter 6, for instance, outlines different types of plants (annuals, perennials, etc.), but would not be confusing for a casual reader or a novice gardener. You feel as if you are chatting with an old friend. You may even laugh out loud, more than once. Especially relatable is Chapter 8’s rant about yellow daylilies. Michel is nonjudgmental in her essays. Her anecdotes are unafraid to go into mistakes she’s made as an experienced gardener; for instance, forgetting to check her garden for a few days, only to find that her ripe pawpaw fruit had been eaten. Stories and details like this make the reader comfortable in their abilities. It stresses that this is a book that anyone can read and anyone can learn something from. Digging and Delighted is best summarized by a quote from the book’s last essay: “There is no perfect weather, soil, location, plants, or gardener. Garden anyway.” o Charlotte Crook is a senior journalism major minoring in history at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. She is an intern this fall with Washington Gardener and is passionate about raising house plants (to varying degrees of success).
Garden Allies: The Insects, Birds, & Other Animals That Keep Your Garden Beautiful and Thriving Author: Frederique Lavoipierre Publisher: Timber Press List Price: $24.95 Order Link: https://amzn.to/3AY5kcH Reviewer: Stacey Evers In Garden Allies, Frederique
Lavoipierre adds her voice to the crescendoing chorus calling for holistic approaches to gardening that work with nature instead of against it. What makes this book different, though, is its singular focus on the living organisms that can help you—if you’ll let them—and the superb organization of the content. Insects dominate Garden Allies’ pages, but Lavoipierre is thorough in her coverage of who’s working with you in the garden. Her attention moves from the ground up, starting with underground organisms and closing with birds and bats. In addition to bees, butterflies, beetles, and bugs, she devotes sections to spiders, centipedes, galls, and even pathogens. The chapters, arranged by biological categories, are further subdivided to focus on specific species. For instance, “The Garden Commons” includes separate pieces on cicadas, damsel and dragonflies, crickets and grasshoppers, praying mantises, lacewings, and ants. For each type of ally, Lavoipierre covers identifying features, habits, habitat needs, cultural context, and tips on how to attract them. The term for what Lavoipierre is promoting is “biological control,” or allowing natural predators, parasites, and herbivores to manage the pests in your garden. Even so, she doesn’t completely rule out pesticides—sometimes they’re needed, she says, such as for massive infestations on your high-value plants. But even then, she favors taking action first with a powerful spray from the garden hose before reaching for a bottle of chemicals.
