Way to Garden: A Hands-On Primer for Every Season by Margaret Roach

Way to Garden: A Hands-On Primer for Every Season

by Margaret Roach

For Margaret Roach gardening is more than a hobby, it’s a calling. Her unique approach, which she refers to as “horticultural how-to and woo-hoo,” is a blend of vital information to memorise (like how to plant a bulb) and intuitive steps gardeners must simply feel and surrender to. For more than twenty years Roach has shared her deep garden knowledge with an appreciative audience, first at Martha Stewart Living and now on her popular website and podcast. Now, with A Way to Garden, she explores how she and her way of gardening have changed over the years. Throughout, she shares helpful advice on seasonal gardening, ornamental plants, vegetable gardening, design, and organic practices. She also challenges gardeners to think beyond their borders and consider the ways that gardening can enrich the world. Lushly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, A Way to Garden is a must-have for home gardeners everywhere.

Reviewed by annieb123 on

5 of 5 stars

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Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

A Way to Garden: A Primer for Gardening Life is an updated re-release of a gardening classic from 1998. Published 30th April 2019 by Timber Press, it's 336 pages and available in hardcover and ebook formats.

The author is a former corporate writer and has a very very intelligent and personable voice. Her style and observations and general philosophy remind me a lot of Sue Hubbell who was another one of my favorite gardening writers. There is a prodigious amount of information here to digest and incorporate, but I never found it overwhelming. She blends the how-to (how deep to plant a tulip bulb, how to store garlic after harvesting, how and why to exploit biomass in the garden) with an understanding of the underlying principles of why (she herself refers to instinctual knowing as "woo woo").

This book is much less of a tutorial guide than (again this word) philosophy of gardening. It could be the Tao of gardening (though that's apparently marketed somewhere else). The sections are arranged in bimonthly time periods which the author relates to a human lifetime: conception, birth, youth, adulthood, senescence, and death and afterlife. Her writing style is conversational and encouraging but also very erudite and reality based. She is a gifted wordsmith. She specifically states throughout that the gardening topics she writes about aren't THE way to garden, but A way of gardening.

The photography is spectacular and really lifts this book into a special class. It's so well done that I intend to buy a physical copy of the hardcover book just to have it on hand as a coffee table art book.

Beautifully written and spectacularly photographed, this is a really worthwhile book.

Five stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

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  • 11 May, 2019: Reviewed