Plant This!: Best Bets for Year-Round Gorgeous Gardens Book

Ketzel Levine is known nation-wide as the Doyenne of Dirt, thanks to her regular gardening chats with the horticulturally challenged Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition. Plant This! is a collection of Levine's 100 best recommendations, drawn from her weekly plant profile columns in the Portland (Oregon) Oregonian. Like many a gardening tome, Levine's covers perennials, grasses, shrubs, and trees. But unlike the prose in most other gardening references, her writing is more than engaging--it's fun. Sure, she tells you the botanical name for each of the plants, but she also explains how to pronounce it (so Arisaema sounds like "Pasadena," and Enkianthus sounds like "send me Kansas"). She also lists the basic needs for each (for jack-in-the-pulpit, this includes part shade, humus-rich soil, good drainage, and human blood) plus its worst enemies (for the magnolia, this is overwatering and excessive shade, while for sumac it's its own greed). These plant profiles are organized by season, they're accompanied by unusually nice illustrations (courtesy of René Eisenbart), and they include wonderful snippets of entertaining information, such as the fact that Euphorbia (common name: spurge) was well known to both the Oubangu tribes of the Congo and the citizens of Julius Caesar's Rome, and story about the iris, which was named after the Greek goddess Iris, who traveled so far, she "picked up rainbow pieces on the soles of her feet, so that wherever she walked on earth, her footprints bore flowers in all the colors of the rainbows she traveled." What other wise, pragmatic, reliable garden reference books include such enjoyable reading? Levine's Plant This! is an exceptional find, a gardening book that's at home on your coffee table as well as in the dirt and mulch of your garden. --Stephanie Gold Read More