About loving gardening books

K

KK

Today, it is miserably cold and wet, so instead of going outside I am really happy to stay indoors with a cuppa and a book full of gardens and gardening. I shoud have grown out of buying books a long time ago, but somehow they keep asking me to be taken home with me. Buying online is what I do most often today, but while in Sweden, I loved driving to a huge "Salvation Army" type of charity store, Myrorna, in Skärholmen, and browsing their large shelves for great finds. Once, I spotted a large, leather bound book on the shelves. It proved to be the German immigrant Daniel Müller's Trädgårdsskötsel (Gardening or Gardener's Advice, three parts bound together) from 1888 in third edition, a wonderful book that first was published between 1848 and 1853, and greatly influenced Swedish gardeners during the second half of the 19th century.

Forcing wild strawberries in a heated bench.

K

How to plant urns with Dracena and Phormium - plants so trendy in the 1990's and 2000's...
K

My edition of Trädgårdsskötsel seems to have been loved by other gardeners before as it is quite worn out, but with its finely engraved pictures and detailed descriptions of how to plan and plant a garden it is one of my favourite garden book finds. It is lovely to read about what was considered "tasteful" in those days, or to look at the elaborated pictures of ways to train fruit trees - some of them clearly meant only to impress the readers and not to be tried in real life (or what do you say about a grape-vine trained like a wine goblet?). What I regret is that I didn't buy almost any of the garden books from the 1960's and 1970's, a period when gardening was mainly about Berberis and hybrid roses. These books were nearly free as nobody wants them now, but the pictures being downright ugly (I know this is a very subjective statement...), I left them to the shelves. Now I think that I should have included them in my collection as witnesses of that time period - and you can always learn something about gardening and garden styles, even if you don't personally like them.

Part of a larger garden in the English style.

K A garden in the German style.

So, for a book loving person like me, the 4th annual Garden Lovers’ Book Sale on April 3rd and 4th at the Elisabeth C. Miller Library is a real treat. Thousands of used gardening, horticulture, botany and landscape design books will be for sale and all proceeds of the sale are used to purchase the best and newest in horticultural books and journals for the library. Book donations will be accepted until March 31, and admittance to the sale is free.

All pictures are from Daniel Müller's Trädgårdsskötsel (1888).