The Conscientious Gardener

Explores how various gardening tasks impact the environment and offers suggestions on how gardeners can ensure they have a minimal impact by reducing their gardening footprint while still enjoying their hobby.

This volume provides a step-by-step guide to offsetting climate change through gardens and landscaping. This book includes information, based on the latest climate research, on how to prevent climate change in your garden and beyond. It introduces climate science for gardeners and gives tips on reducing your landscape's climate footprint and even making your garden into a "carbon sink". This work provides strategies for placing trees, shrubs, and vines to reduce the energy needed to heat and cool your home and information about how to design a food garden that minimizes emissions while providing fresh, healthy produce. In addition it includes an overview of community tree-planting, food saving, and citizen science projects.

A stylish, inspirational and practical guidebook to maintaining a more environmentally friendly outdoor space, now shortlisted for the GMG GARDEN BOOK OF THE YEAR award! Sustainable gardener Marian Boswall walks us through the process of creating and maintaining a sustainable outdoor space, offering tips, guidance and step-by-step projects designed to help you lead a more low-impact lifestyle. Whether it’s by harnessing natural energy, converting to peat-free compost, reducing your consumption of plastic, saving seeds or creating garden areas from reclaimed materials, there are numerous ways – both big and small – to make a difference. Entries cover every aspect of the garden, from how to create a space and draw up a plan for your sustainable garden from scratch, to advice on boundaries and fences, and guidance on how to ethically source materials to make sure your garden is as environmentally friendly as it is beautiful. This book also contains several projects with easy-to-follow instructions that you can replicate at home, such as creating a frame for succulents to grow in out of recycled materials. Projects include: Plant an edible hedge - This berry-laden boundary brings joy into your garden and offers a great way to connect to and notice the seasons for both children and adults, Make a lawn spiral - This innovative approach to lawns will reduce mowing time by half (thereby saving energy) and will create a beautiful, textured swirl of flowering grass which is good for pollinators, Make your own frame for succulents - Using recycled and found materials, create your own vertical planter for a host of succulents, perfect for balconies or other small spaces, Saving your seeds - Collecting seeds from your garden is the perfect way to start planning ahead for your garden next year, all while reducing waste. Sustainable Garden will guide anyone hoping to take informed and intelligent decisions to make a difference, but who perhaps don’t know where to begin.

Functioning as a spiritual-development manual as well as a beginner's gardening guide, this informative reference teaches gardeners how to bring the angelic dimension of cocreation into their green thumb work by communicating directly with nature. A plentiful supply of earthy examples in the form of first-person narratives spell out the steps necessary to garden in conscious cooperation with joyful devas and nature spirits, such as allowing gardeners to consult with pests before waging chemical warfare and to seek approval from trees and shrubs before making drastic cuts. The fun, simple strategies showcased in the guide--including sections on fertilizer and compost, plus tips about specific vegetables, soils, and insects--do not require psychic abilities or meditation skills to bring forth the continual miracles that will maximize a garden's potential. Appendices include a who's-who of devas and nature spirits and a short review of the classic Findhorn Garden story.

Written for today's water-conscious gardener, this book provides cutting-edge information on how to grow more than 270 colorful, unthirsty flowering perennials, shrubs, and ornamental grasses adapted to dry-climate regions. Over 125 large color photos provide ideas to create appealing, easy-care gardens and make it easy to select flowering plants best suited to particular regions. The book was especially prepared for gardeners in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. It provides proper planting dates and recommended plants and growing techniques for each area, and shows how to prepare soils, make compost, and get the most out of water.

One of the world's leading child psychologists shatters the myth of "good parenting" Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. Yet the thing we call "parenting" is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor intended to create a particular kind of child and therefore a particular kind of adult. In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrong--it's not just based on bad science, it's bad for kids and parents, too. Drawing on the study of human evolution and her own cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn, Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way. Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative, and to be very different both from their parents and from each other. The variability and flexibility of childhood lets them innovate, create, and survive in an unpredictable world. “Parenting" won't make children learn—but caring parents let children learn by creating a secure, loving environment.