Rainy Side Gardeners' Featured Books of the Past
The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-Less, Grow-More Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden
by Ivette Soler
Paperback: 216 pages
From Booklist
A picture is worth a thousand words, and Soler's guide to combining vegetables, flowers, herbs, and fruit trees for front yard curb appeal proves it. This "germinatrix" demonstrates with numerous full-color, page-filling photos the literal and figurative beauty in transforming a "wasteful time-consuming, toxic monoculture . . . an anti-social space" into a "more evolved and exciting version of front yard beauty that prizes health, diversity, and pleasure over short-term convenience." Soler?s suggestions for well-designed lawn alternatives emphasize color, form, and varietal texture found in such commonplace and utilitarian flora as apple trees, fragrant basil with its African Blue blooms, and the "burnished stems, elongated leaves, and purple lacquered fruit of eggplants." An alphabetical listing of ornamental edibles from apples to wormwood (a genus of insect-repelling plants with silvery foliage as intoxicating—visually, that is—as its putatively hallucinogenic distillate, absinthe) combined with landscaping tips for various building styles and a resources list round out a useful and inspiring volume. —Whitney Scott
About the Author
Ivette Soler is a garden designer and writer living in Los Angeles, California. Ivette’s garden writing has been featured in Garden Design, Cottage Living, and Budget Living, and she was the resident gardening expert on NBC’s The Bonnie Hunt Show. Her popular gardening blog, The Germinatrix, originated in 2006 as a part of Domino magazine.
View previous featured book, or the entire index.
Gardening for the Homebrewer: Grow and Process Plants for Making Beer, Wine, Gruit, Cider, Perry, and More
By co-authors Debbie Teashon (Rainy Side Gardeners) and Wendy Tweton