Are there any books devoted exclusively to fragrant plants/gardening? If so what are some of your faves? I don't have any, but I am definitely interested. I know a lot of the heirloom books have good lists of fragrant plants as a lot of the plants grown years back were fragrant. It's a shame that breeding has taken the scent away from so many plants that were formerly fragrant.
Favorite Books
I havnt read it but, this book came up under one of my searches tonight.
"The Fragrant Year" by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell. If anyone has read it I would love to hear about it.
Its not books, but I have learned a lot from looking at the online seed companies. Many of them (like Select Seed) has fragrant plant sections on their website.
Heavin,
Thanks for that as I was beginning to think maybe there weren't any books devoted to fragrants. I'll see if my library has it and I too hope someone who has read it will post.
anson,
I too find those invaluable. I get a lot of plants at Forest Farm and never knew 'til the other day that if you go to their site you can select 'fragrant plants' as a category. I went thru it the other night and I had no idea they had so many. I am now going thru my paper catalog and notating the fragrant plants- LOL! A lot of them [sadly] aren't hardy in my zone..... :(
Yes I know many are tropical, but a lot of those tropical ones will just die back to the ground in winter and come back in spring. Can you imagine having an entire garden full of fragrant plants. I don't think I would ever leave it. I may pitch a tent in it lol. We are so fortunate to have access to so much information these days. One day, I hope not too far away, I want someone to show up at my house just because they want to walk through my fragrant garden. Wowsers.
I guess there just aren't that many books dedicated to fragrant plants.....:(
Maybe we all ought to get together and write one- LOL!
Oops.......... forgot about this: http://davesgarden.com/gbw/advanced.php?category=84&submit=Go
What good are books? DG is where we need to be!
Where else can we find at a glance what grows best for us and share our loves?
Vi,
doesn't it count that the link is from DG? LOL!
Gee Deb, you're as bad as me!
Books just don't let you ask questions!
I think the books are great, but those darn seeds, potting soil, and the rest of it is gettin all my funds right at the moment. And now, wintersowing has got me collecting soda bottles. When will it stop!.!.!
Never!
Im with you ansonfan. I rather be buying plants than books. Everything I need is on this computer. I do find that some of the garden mags are helpful in color combos and placement but I usually just skim them. It has to be really good for me to buy it. Most of the time they are just annuals and shrubs, fragrants don't usually make the mags.
You will all have to pardon my dyslexia.
edited for errors.
This message was edited Jan 8, 2006 1:39 PM
How true, how true. There is nothing that can take the place of just putting your hands in the dirt, and spending time with your plants. A chef can learn much at school, but its of no value until he or she gets in the kitchen and starts cooking!!
Are y'all sure you don't want us bookworms to share any books on fragrant plants with you?
Barnes and Noble had a great old classic for around $3.50 the other day. Is anyone curious?
Just in case y'all don't invite me back, let me say that I cannot imagine a better book on fragrant plants than Wilson & Bells' The Fragrant Year. You know how we feel about fragrant plants? Well, Helen van Pelt Wilson writes like Don Juan would write about fragrant plants if those were his first love.
But, there are many others, and like people, they all have different personalities and complement each other in different ways.
Blue,
That is the book I am going to try to find at the library. I too love books- all kinds. Until I discovered gardening, reading anD collecting books were my obsession- LOL!!
For $3.50 I'd bite! So many books are just priced so high! And I'm 40 miles from the big towns, lol. Perhaps I'll check Amazon.
Go ahead blue, spill your brains ;>}
Editing to add Amazon's lowest price is $9.95, someone said it's out of print and rare, is this true? I'd also like to know where in the country or world they base their experience, England?
This message was edited Jan 8, 2006 10:18 PM
Vi,
I order a lot of stuff thru Amazon. I like their prices and I found I like shopping online too. Somedays I am just too lazy to go to the store- LOL!
Karen I apologize if it sounds like I don't like garden books, I really have a lot of them, but its hard to find a garden book that is really useful, to me anyway. I have found a few on herbs that have been very informative, and I use them often.
If y'all feel like you've gotta apologize to me, then I must have presented my thoughts in the manner of a hairy, knuckle-dragging know-it-all - ROFLMBO.
I have been working on a gardener's guide to the internet. It's needs more work, but no better time to curl up with a book than January, so I'm going to go ahead anyway and post it - warts and all - in this forum on a separate thread. It's about 19 pages long, so will do a chain of posts in that thread by category.
There's something wonderful that bookworms can do on the internet that they can't do in print. They can "float" text in a little 2" x 4" box over art they put up on the screen of their computer monitor as "wallpaper". So, my gardener's internet guide fools around with that a bit. That aspect needs refining.
For anything in print, I'll stick to this thread. I am not at all up on current books, so somebody needs to help us all out there.
Viola, that book I found for under $3.50 is now up to $8.93 at http://search.barnesandnoble.com/used/productMatches.asp?userid=cz0b4GpCCV&PEAN=9780020319917&newDisc=0&page=%2Fbooksearch%2Fresults%2Easp&wbflg=N - maybe it's less expensive elsewhere, but I think to get something priceless for that amount is a pretty good deal. The book is Louise Beebe Wilder's The Fragrant Path.
So far, I haven't found any copies of Wilson and Bell's The Fragrant Year - but I didn't look very long. Their gardens were located around Philadelpha, Pennsylvania and in Connecticut. I will continue quoting from that book since no one seems able to find a copy.
Wilson's favorite book on fragrant plants was Wilder's The Fragrant Path, and she considered her book a horticultural update to Wilder's book.
Continuing their sumptuous styles of prose with comprehensiveness in the 90s, I would say that Stephen Lacey's The Startling Jungle would be the one to carry that particular torch. He also wrote another book - of a more encyclopedic nature and less of a "Mozart-style of horticultural writing" called Scent in Your Garden. But what do reviewers know?
Of all the books I could recommend to begin crafting a garden, these would be the first three.
Hi I have a copy of 'The Fragrant Year' which I bought at a bookstall at a horticultural show in London some years ago. I found it really inspirational when I first started growing fragrant plants because they write with such passion about the fragrances of the individual plants they grow.The language though, is less OTT than that in the Wilder's 'The Fragrant Path' and so it is much more readable. The book is lacking in any colour photographs which today we generally take for granted - the illustrations restricted to drawings of the plants which nonethess are really well executed. There are a lot more fragrant plants to choose from than those covered in the book though, and so it is still worth investigating other sources to see what is out there.
One of my other favourites is Stephen Lacey's 'Scent In Your Garden' which is divided into sections such as Shrubs, Perennials, Annuals and Biennials, Bulbs .....and Conservatory Plants.
There is a good variety of plants described in each section with photographs, and it is an excellent book to use to begin developing a fragrant garden. The one reservation I have about the book though, is SL's descriptions of the flower perfumes which don't seem very accurate after investigating them for myself. For example I seem to recall he describes the scent of the half-hardy Buddleja asiatica as 'lemony,' when it has a perfume exactly like that of Freesias (quite unlike the usual honey scent of Buddleja davidii). It kind of makes you wonder whether he, himself has smelled all these plants he has written about in the book. That's the only reservation though.
Matt
Blue, Your posts make me think you write for a living. Have you ever written any books other than gardening?
Matt - "still worth investigating other sources to see what is out there" - absolutely yes! I just suggested those 3 as a great beginning. Among others, there are 2 styles of presenting information:
One is the kind that cures your insomnia and puts you quickly into a deep sleep from which you wake rested and in full command of all your assumptions - unchanged - with which you snoozed off,
and the other is the kind that has you overturning heaven and earth in pursuit of intimations of "things unseen and undreamed of" - each blast of insight leads to another and another - every "fact" transforms into a question leading to the next fact which masks another hypothesis, and so on. Sleep becomes an infernal nuisance.
I can remember when I had absolutely no interest in gardening, and Wilson and Bell's book's style ignited the second state of mind in me. Don't we all enjoy a good horticultural chase? Whether we have the wherewithall to physically realize our garden dreams, though doesn't matter - books can cultivate the ability to appreciate and imagine. Remember that poem by Emily Dickinson in which she says a bee and a clover make a prairie? (It's in that tome on free, online books I just posted on this forum)
Heavinscent, I am not a writer. If certain reversals of job and health hadn't knocked me out of my previous routines, during which I discovered DG a couple of years ago, I would not be fooling around with language. As Horseshoe said, "Ain't it fun?"
Anybody read any of these books: http://davesgarden.com/gbw/advanced.php?category=84&submit=Go