Garden Essays

Paula Deitz has delighted readers for more than 30 years with her vivid descriptions of both famous and hidden landscapes. Her writings allow readers and listeners to share in the experience of her extensive travels, from the waterways of Britain's Castle Howard to the Japanese gardens of Kyoto, and home again to New York City's Central Park.

Two officers walk through an abandoned house in India and find a nine-year-old girl standing alone in a room — forgotten there when a cholera epidemic killed everyone else, because no one in the house had ever formed the habit of noticing her. That is how Mary Lennox enters her own novel. Twenty-seven chapters later, she has crossed the world alone, taught herself to dress, found a locked garden and a hidden invalid, and talked a boy out of believing himself dying. And then, in the final chapter, without a word of dialogue given to her again, the book forgets her a second time. This ...

In this groundbreaking classic essay collection, Alice Walker speaks out as a Black woman, writer, mother, and feminist on topics ranging from the personal to the political. Originally published forty years ago, Alice Walker’s first collection of nonfiction is a dazzling compendium that...

The beloved actress and star of One Tree Hill, White Collar, and Lethal Weapon, Hilarie Burton, tells the inspiring story of leaving Hollywood for a radically different kind of life in upstate New York with her husband Jeffrey Dean Morgan—a celebration of community, family, and the value of...

The internationally bestselling author of The Hidden Life of Trees shows how we can decipher nature's secret signs by studying the weather. The internationally bestselling author of The Hidden Life of Trees shows how we can decipher nature's secret signs by studying the weather. In this...

Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.

The earth is not a dead, mute landscape but an eloquent, living being. Sometimes it just takes a spade, a packet of seeds, and a pair of sturdy boots to realize it. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han spent three springs, summers, autumns, and winters in his secret garden in Berlin, devoting himself...

The Nature Writing Essentials Collection gathers fourteen works of wilderness reflection, natural history, travel, memoir, and literary observation.

A comprehensive, upbeat guide to help you survive the moving process from start to finish, filled with fresh strategies and checklists for timing and supplies, choosing which items to toss and which to keep, determining the best place to live, saying farewell and looking forward to hello. Moving...

"In this fascinating, witty, and provocative book, Delbourgo's collectors range from emperors to scientists, from shopaholics to taxonomists, from bibliomaniacs to serial killers. Give it to the collector in your life, and watch the sparks fly!"―Cathy Gere, author of The Tomb of Agamemnon A...

Pulling Weeds and Patching Life: Confessions from a Crooked Garden What do tangled hoses, runaway chickens, and zucchini the size of toddlers have in common? Apparently—your emotional wellbeing. In this laugh-out-loud and deeply relatable collection of essays, author and accidental philosopher Debbie Danielsen digs into the messy joy of tending both garden beds and soul wounds. With dirt under her nails and humor in her heart, she explores how compost can teach you about grief, mint about boundaries, and why talking to your tomatoes isn’t all that weird (especially if they talk back). ...

This program is read by the author. South Toward Home is a wry and humorous audiobook about life and culture in the American South. In thinking about her native land, Julia Reed quotes another Southern writer, Willie Morris, who said, “It’s the juxtapositions that get you down here.” These...

A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers—an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an...

In her new collection of autobiographical essays, Nino Gugunishvili offers her reflections and meditations on grief and loss, on friendship and longing, on memory and aging, on writing, and not writing, told through her personal experiences, forming an intimate, confessional narrative.

Perros de presa adiestrados por gente sin escrúpulos, un chucho mexicano tuerto y digno, el fila brasileño que no era un asesino, Jemmy y Boxer, que cruzaron el Valle de la Muerte con la Brigada Ligera, el perro flaco y bastardo de la batalla de Rocroi....

Get ready for a wild ride through the most shocking, inspiring and downright unbelievable stories about plant life, from the experts at Botanic Gardens of Sydney. This is your backstage pass to the drama, mystery and importance of Earth’s most overlooked species. Blending science, true crime...

This Old House meets #HomeImprovementFails in this collection of laugh-out-loud essays, perfect for fans of Nick Offerman, CarTalk, or The Red Green Show. “This book is all the fix-it you need for your hurt home improvement ego.” —Harrison Scott Key, Thurber-prize winning author of The...

Angela Douglas shares the joys and curiosities of a decidedly ordinary patch of green in upstate New York cultivated through the art of “strategic neglect"―sometimes taking a hand to manage wildlife, more often letting nature go its own way. From the first flowers of spring and the fireflies of high summer to a hoarding chipmunk in the fall and cardinals singing in the winter, Douglas shows us the magic of welcoming unexpected plant life and animal life into one’s backyard.

Make your garden flourish with these 300 easy and inexpensive gardening hacks to help your plants blossom—perfect for any green thumbs, first-time horticulturalists, or reluctant gardeners! Think you don’t have a green thumb? Think again! No matter your gardening woes, Gardening Hacks has...

In the era of wolf-whistle politics, women are sick of being degraded. When Sarah Hanson-Young called out the abuse she received from male parliamentarians as slut-shaming, she sparked a national conversation about the rampant sexism in politics. Placing the responsibility on women to defend themselves is the same cheap trick as asking, why didn't she just fight back? After witnessing verbal abuse levelled at female parliamentarians and public figures, Hanson-Young is convinced that now is the time to call it out and not retreat.