THE VINTAGE FARMHOUSE GARDEN: Your Guide to Creating a Vintage-Inspired Outdoor Space, lovely AND practical!

THE VINTAGE FARMHOUSE GARDEN: Your Guide to Creating a Vintage-Inspired Outdoor Space
RHONDA KAISER
Cool Springs Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$30.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Vintage Farmhouse Gardenis the first garden design book to focus on the vintage-inspired farmhouse aesthetic and how to bring it to your outdoor space—no farm required. With the insight and inspiration found in The Vintage Farmhouse Garden, you’ll create a gorgeous, vintage-inspired outdoor space, overflowing with style and charm.

Garden and design influencer Rhonda Kaiser (@southernhomeandfarm) partners vintage-inspired design with the farmhouse aesthetic to make your outdoor space as beautiful and welcoming as possible. Whether it’s by creating a stunning tablescape, arranging a welcoming front porch, designing a peaceful outdoor garden oasis, or displaying a collection of seasonal plants and vintage accessories, Rhonda helps you bring all the classic comforts of a farm home into your garden, no matter where you live.

Inside, you’ll find inspiration on how to:

Turn your farmhouse garden vision into reality

Select and plant vibrant fruits, flowers, and shrubs for your farmhouse garden

Include vintage finds in your garden design

Shape a welcoming space, from your front porch to your back gate

Incorporate and decorate outbuildings like greenhouses and toolsheds to make them as beautiful as they are useful

Add pollinator-friendly plants to your garden

Celebrate the seasons by inviting and entertaining others in your space

Plus, favorite recipes using fresh flavors from the garden

Discover the joys of curating a collection of vintage accessories and showcasing it as part of a well-designed farmhouse garden, overflowing with a colorful collection of edible and ornamental plants. Welcome to The Vintage Farmhouse Garden.

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

My Review: At last! I'm reviewing an aspirational book, like y'all love to ogle and drool over.

Well...yes, but in a curious way, no. This is not just a book of how to make a pretty garden in a certain old-fashioned model. It's a way to create a beautiful outdoor space to use and enjoy; it's also about getting that space to serve a very practical purpose, attracting pollinators and producing good things in the process.

There are many wonderful things about using plants to help increase the pollinators' food supply. You enjoy the flowers; they enjoy the buffet the flowers represent. A beautiful space to enjoy and live in that's also a haven for life, instead of a deadening array of hybridized-to-uselessness botanical tchotchkes, is a very good thing to create.

start with ideas

move to plans and procedures

The book is a beauty. It's got everything I'd say is important to have in this kind of book: aspiration, inspiration, and how to use your perspiration to make it come true. The price is, for this category of gift books, reasonable; tablet viewing worked very well. A tree book is always the most fun to have for us oldsters, but as a gift I don't know many who would kvetch at either form.

Wonderful self-gift, too!

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.