How often does a person remember someone’s name from a magazine article or masthead? Well, I remember Margaret Roach from years of issues of Martha Stewart Living and was thrilled to read her book here. It seems to be a 21st-anniversary revision of a prior book, and it’s a good update of practices, pests and plants.

It’s coffee-table sized, with smooth pages and beautiful, full-color (often, full-page) photos that are very well-captioned. The organization is by life cycle/annual calendar, dedicating two months each to Conception, Birth, Youth, Adulthood, Senescence, and Death and Afterlife. I started dutifully at the beginning and it was informative and pleasurable, but then jumped to the current time of year (May/June), which immersed me in early summer tasks and plants before I went back and then went on to finish the rest.

Roach’s voice is practical and encouraging, reminding the reader to design a landscape that is beautiful when viewed from inside the house (where one mostly will see it). Overall, it’s less a reference or how-to, and more so a lush, inspirational volume about one New York/zone 5B garden, perfect for armchair gardeners and for active gardeners when the day’s tasks are complete. ( )

This was an excellent gardening book with gorgeous photos as well as practical and inspirational gardening essays. The author has recently updated the book which was first published 20 years ago and she now includes such recent topics as gardening more with native plants, gardening for birds and pollinators and learning how to live with pesky critters in the garden. I like her idea of separating gardening seasons in 2 month chunks which she corresponds to the life cycle of Conception, Birth, Youth, Adulthood, Senescence, and Death and Afterlife. This is a book oriented towards gardening in the northeastern United States so although it contains entertaining ideas about gardening which anyone can use and enjoy it is not suitable information about her plant choices which may or may not do well if you live in a different zone and climate in the U.S. I enjoyed reading this book but will pass it on to my library as it does not reflect my reality of gardening in arid southern Colorado. ( )

I love this book. The author's essays are thoughtful and a joy to read. I picked up so many odd and useful bits of information in the process of reading the book that I'm very grateful for the excellent index which will help me find them again.

Somebody dropped the ball badly on the subtitle. This book is in no way a hands-on primer, despite its very helpful section on saving tomato seeds and a few other detours into the extremely practical. "A gardener's companion" comes closer to the mark. Margaret Roach in cheerful humility shares all-too-relatable stories of gardening mistakes that made me cringe along with her, and feel better about my own mishaps. Those "easy to grow" plants that turn out to be invasive, oh my! She also shares joys of the garden. She's more of a landscape gardener, grower of ornamentals, and I'm all about edible perennials and food forests, but after her praise of the beauty of large-leafed plants in general and rhubarb in particular, I'll never see my rhubarb patch as mere pies-in-process again.

Rather than the typical through-the-year arrangement of garden books by seasons, Roach has chosen to divide the gardening cycle into six stages of life. It works so much better. I look forward to rereading this book at the appropriate moments of many years to come. ( )

Inside the rather plain-looking cover of this book are pages brimming with sweet photos, bits of wisdom and thoughtful reflections on years of gardening.

I too share the author’s dislike of the forsythia bush -- “the vomit of spring.”

And I share her love of frogs, exotic indoor plants, hellebores and dried poppy seed heads.

It took me a while to get through this book because I found myself off on tangents researching plant and seed catalogs, trying to identify obscure weeds and expanding my own newly-created binder of gardening photos and notes.

This is a lovely book that encouraged me to do even more with my gardens, but also to just sit back and savor what I already have. ( )

This is a perfect gardening book. Seasonal, what looks good where, it's a good guideline for a beginner and a helpful aid to a mid-level fling-gardener like me. That's what I call my method of gardening/planting. I live in Colorado, know my zone, get as xeric as I can get with what I put in the ground and container. But I just takes my chances with mostly what I call 'rescue plants'. Look a bit scraggly and need a good home. Anyway, I can put them in various spots in front and back, in a container, in the berm...fling....This book can help guide me to put colors together or better plants of varying moisture requirements. And to not take everything down just because it's fall or winter. Birds need food, critters need a place to rest, and the structural beauty is there as well.
I really like this book and glad I received it to review. It will go on my shelf to refer to often. ( )