A YEAR OF GARDEN-INSPIRED LIVING: Season by Season, inspirational as well as aspirational

A YEAR OF GARDEN-INSPIRED LIVING: Season by Season
LINDA VATER
Cool Springs Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$30.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Year of Garden-Inspired Living is a giftable homage to living seasonally and is filled with inspiration for creating a garden-inspired life of grace and abundance. Bring simplicity and grace into your life, garden, home, and community with this treasured collection of ideas and daily inspiration from garden lifestyle guru Linda Vater.

Whether it’s connecting with a neighbor over a bowl of homemade soup, displaying a much-adored collection of books, creating personalized seed packets, setting a beautiful seasonal tablescape, or compiling a basket of comforts for someone in need, author Linda Vater (@potagerblog) has gathered a wealth of reflections on how to make the ordinary extraordinary and bring the joy of the garden’s seasons back into your life.

Each page features a narrative story about a special life moment, followed by an idea for bringing that moment to fruition in your own life, all organized by the season. Beautiful watercolor illustrations add further inspiration and a spark of creativity to the notion on each page.

A small sampling of the guidance found inside includes:

Giving a house blessing to a brand-new homeowner

Picking a seasonal wardrobe “piece” and letting it shine

Spreading seeds in an old spice jar

Being intentionally inefficient

Wearing your garden boots with a flouncy dress

Welcoming friends and neighbors to cut bouquets from your garden

Having a “ladybug party” for the children in your life

Creating herbal bouquets for cooking

Making and displaying decorative fall leaf bouquets

And so much more!

A Year of Garden-Inspired Living offers an elegant yet easy way to bring the joys and textures of seasonal living into your daily life, welcoming peace and connection to your days and restoring the balance of nature’s seasons in your home and life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Charming, gentle anecdotes centered on a woman's garden as she moves through her very aspirationally bourgeois year.

Interesting reading for a resolute urbanite who quails inwardly at the notion of suburbia. I was fascinated by this Junior-League vision of a leisurely life I'd thought was dead. No one I know who isn't retired has this kind of time to putter and potter and coddiwomple hither, thither, and yon to be a willing slave to a bunch of botanical divas.

Absorbing, in a very retro way. Belong to a gardening club? The girls'll love this!

we're going hard on seasonality

This is, I'd guess, a gift item for your older female friends who do the relaxed lifestyle and would enjoy learning how to put some intentionality into the day. Rhythms of the seasons always make life feel purposeful, add that sense of being in a world larger and more...complete...than one's private world.

These samples of the design style might tell you what my review can't:

You get the picture...all very focused, true to an aesthetic, and sharply defined by softness and gentle colors.

THE TRADESCANTS' ORCHARD, a spectacular gift book for your garden lover

THE TRADESCANTS' ORCHARD
The Bodleian Library
$65.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the early seventeenth century, England’s leisured classes took an eager interest in fruits from the Mediterranean and beyond, introducing species from abroad into the kitchen gardens and orchards of grand homes. A charming collection of sixty-six early watercolors showing fecund trees with fruits hanging heavily from their branches, The Tradescants’ Orchard is a testament to these broadening horticultural horizons.

The Tradescants’ Orchard reproduces for the first time the entire manuscript, traditionally associated with the renowned father-and-son nurserymen the John Tradescants. The paintings pose many questions: Who painted them and why? What is the significance of the wildlife—birds, butterflies, frogs, and snails—that appear throughout? Why is there only one depiction of an apple tree despite its popularity? Were there others that have since gone missing?

A visual feast that will appeal to botany and gardening enthusiasts, the book also includes an introduction that maps out the mystery of how and why these enigmatic watercolors were made.

My Review: Visual perfection, this. A gorgeous old book, not a scientific treatise but more likely (or so scholarly opinion has it now) a sort of seed catalogue made to entice the wealthy landowners of its century (the 17th century, we're pretty sure) into planting fashionable gardens and orchards. How can this be a sure analysis of the book's origin? We have many examples of herbals and botanical texts from earlier and contemporary times...this book's charming and attractive artwork isn't scientifically accurate. It's even whimsical at times, and how many whimsical scientists have you ever met? Or even heard of?

Look at this! Just look at the itty-bitty bugs! How totes adorbs are they?!

But they're fantasy bugs, not carefully rendered anatomically observed type models, and those things are present in the academic books produced at and before the time this book was made.

The Bodleian Library, an ancient (to my American eyes) repository of bookish treasures from all ages of England's long, long history of literary greatness, publishes facsimiles like this as well as fascinating and little-known treasures once common, for this generation's curious and cultured to consume. This is God's Work from my point of view. There is no more important duty for a library than to preserve and disseminate the words, ideas, images, thoughts and prayers, of the past to the present. In this sacred trust they are assisted by their US distributor, the University of Chicago Press, which has the Great Chicago Book Sale running. This book was a birthday gift to me from a friend who gave me a gift card. It was only $19 in the book sale! A perfect amount of money to spend on a lavish-looking gift given to your slightly distant but important to remember giftee this Yuletide. And, bookish friends, you won't be able to leave the book sale without acquiring a few treasures for yourownselves. This link takes you to the sale catalog. Use code AD1647 to get the discounted prices when checking out.

Can you resist spending a lousy $20 to get over 100 pages of joy like this image of a cherry varietal?

I though not. You're welcome.