Author(s): Sara Bonnett Stein
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company;
Hardcover: 464 pages
ISBN: 0395709601
ISBN-13: 978-0395709603
Order From: Amazon.com
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Sarah Stein’s brilliant book Noah’s Garden placed the author at the forefront of the new field of ecological gardening. Now, in Planting Noah’s Garden, she tells the even more fascinating story of the many ways people in all parts of the country are redesigning their surroundings to welcome back the birds, butterflies, fireflies, and other creatures driven away by the sterility of the typical suburban landscape. In the second half of the book she offers specific information readers will find nowhere else: how to learn the common flora of your region; how to handle group wholesale orders; how to kill invasive plants; how to collect and plant wild seeds; how to start a tree island; how to plan a patio habitat – and much, much more. Planting Noah’s Garden is both a call to action and a blueprint for a new gardening aesthetic.
Nature and Ecology Editor’s Recommended Book, 08/01/97
In Noah’s Garden, published in 1994, gardener and writer Sara Stein addressed the business of making a messy backyard–of restoring a naturally chaotic and dynamic floral-faunal-microbial system in the place of neatly tended, carefully selected and weeded, and ultimately artificial gardens. Just as charmingly written as its predecessor, Planting Noah’s Garden furthers Stein’s campaign to make lawns animated, full of disorder, life, and wildness. Studded with ringing tributes to alumroot, trillium, goldenrod, bellworts, and mayflowers, this is a lovely gardener’s manifesto. Packed with practical instructions for planning and maintaining a garden of one’s own, it’s also wonderful entertainment for anyone with a green thumb.
Fine Gardening
Stein’s radical approach was never destined for everyone. But for those who may want to follow her lead, Planting Noah’s Garden provides a wealth of how-to detail for reestablishing a natural landscape, inviting the rest of us to contemplate–and implement–a real compromise between Stein’s ungardening and our suburbs’ unyieldingness.
70 color photos. 100 illustrations.
