Brooklyn Botanic Garden All-Region Guides

Healthy Soils for Sustainable Gardens

Create a resource-wise garden! This hands-on guide helps you understand the unique characteristics of your garden's soil and shows you how to build its natural fertility with organic and sustainable methods. Written by soil and horticulture experts from across North America, Healthy Soils emphasizes the importance of nurturing a diverse ecosystem of beneficial soil organisms by using recycled and renewable organic amendments and mulches, planting nutrient-enhancing cover crops and ornamentals, and matching plants to your site conditions.

Growing Bonsai Indoors

An introduction to beautiful tropical and subtropical bonsai that can thrive inside your home year-round Tailored to the needs of first-time bonsai growers, this hands-on guide explains step-by-step how to make indoor bonsai flourish. You'll find a thorough overview of the most common bonsai styles—fully illustrated with color photos and line drawings—along with advice on wiring and pruning from renowned experts. This handy guide also serves as a helpful reference for buying bonsai and connecting with other enthusiasts locally and around the world.

Community Gardening

Today, new concerns about food safety and sustainable practices, greater isolation from neighbors, and the loss of gardening space have made the age-old practice of community gardening more relevant than ever. Whether you are already a member of a community garden, want to get involved in one, or are just curious, this guide offers valuable lessons about cultivation and cooperation—as well as dynamic gardens and great food!

The Wildlife Gardener's Guide

If you can have only one book about attracting wildlife to your garden, this is it. This concise guide recommends ten specific wildlife-garden projects and provides countless tips that will make your garden a refuge for wild creatures. Inside you'll also find helpful information on the best bird foods and feeders, lists of plants that are attractive to the wildlife in your region, garden plans, and much more. In short, you'll find everything you need to create a garden that wows winged friends like birds, butterflies, and hummingbirds, as well as human visitors.

Buried Treasures: Tasty Tubers of the World

Take a culinary global tour of more than 30 edible plants that match their underground bounty with a fabulous aboveground display. Feature them as showstopping house or garden plants, or harvest a few and cook up tasty dishes. Buried Treasures tells the fascinating stories of these essential food plants and provides cultivation tips including where to buy hard-tofind varieties and how to make more tubers at home. Dig in!

Gardening With Children

What better way to connect children with the natural world than through gardening? Team up with the youngsters in your care on scores of fun outdoor and indoor garden-related activities. Share the joy of watching plants and the animals that live among them grow and flourish as you guide children in the discovery of nature's cycles and communities.

The Tree Care Primer

In this indispensable guide you'll learn to assess your trees' health and understand what they need as you pick up the basic concepts and essential techniques of common-sense tree care. Whether you are preparing to plant a tree, maintaining a few mature beauties, or deciding on the best course of action to support a long-neglected specimen, you'll find the information you need to promote your trees' long-term well-being in this compact book.

Native Alternatives to Invasive Plants

The indispensable guide for everyone who loves dazzling gardens and cares about the health of North America's remaining wild landscapes. In this handbook, plant professionals and home gardeners alike will discover hundreds of spectacular native plants for every region, specially chosen as alternatives to the invasive species that are degrading and destroying the continent's natural habitats. These beautiful wildflowers, shrubs, and trees not only serve as alternatives to invasive plants but also offer food for butterflies, birds, and other wildlife.

Crazy About Cacti and Succulents

What is it about cacti and other succulents that compels their admirers to go well beyond the lonely windowsill specimen or rock-garden sedum? In this delightful guide you'll learn about stapeliads, ceropegias, and other jewels of the botanical world from people whose passion for these fascinating plants has led them to the art of bonsai, to competitive exhibition, and to growing them outdoors in frigid climates and on roofs. You'll also discover myriad ways to make cacti and succulents happy in your home and garden while helping to save them in their wild habitats.

Designing Borders for Sun and Shade

A boon for even the most artistically challenged, this book shows how to design dazzling flower borders that include beautiful shrubs, grasses, bulbs, and annuals—not just high-maintenance herbaceous perennials. Garden writer, nurseryman, and designer Bob Hyland, who has gardened on both coasts and in between, describes how you can create a gorgeous border in sun or shade and offers design styles and plant suggestions suited to North America's many diverse regions and climates.

100 Garden Tips and Timesavers

100 fully illustrated tips to help gardeners minimize maintenance, maximize enjoyment, save time and money, and conserve water and other resources, organized by subject for quick and easy reference: Gardening Techniques; Improving the Soil; Pest Controls; Propagation; Garden Design; Container Gardening; Gardening Indoors; Vegetables; and Trash to Treasure.

The Best Apples to Buy and Grow

Your indispensable field guide to the crispy, crunchy, intensely flavorful apples increasingly available at supermarkets, farmer's markets, farm stands, and orchards. Use this handbook to discover some of the tastiest antique and modern varieties, and how to use them for cooking, baking, cider making, or eating fresh.

Intimate Gardens

Garden design doesn't have to be mystifying! This information-packed guide will help you transform your yard into a magical, intimate place. The trick is to combine a few important elements in a harmonious design; well-proportioned spaces, a comfortable sense of enclosure, and just the right plants to weave it all together. Discover how to create a comfortable outdoor room that entices you with its colors, textures, forms, and fragrance. Your yard can become an extension of your living space, whether an inviting terrace for dining, a quiet corner with a bench, or a captivating space for children and adults to explore the natural world.

Designing an Herb Garden

Endlessly adaptable and easy to grow, herbs are the perfect plants for designing a garden that's ornamental, practical, and intoxicatingly fragratn. This inspiring guide walks you through the project from plan to planting and harvest. Written by expert herb gardeners, this beautifully illustrated volumn has everything you ned to design a dazzling herb garcenósimple garden plans, plant recommendations for each design, and indispensable growing tips.

The Gardener's Guide to Growing Orchids

This volume, a companion to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden handbook The Best Orchids for Indoors, provides an in-depth look at the basics of successful orchid growing. The key to growing spectacular tropical orchids indoors lies in identifying the needs of the individual plants and finding the combination of conditions that makes them thrive-from amenable potting mixtures to adequate light, temperature and humidity levels.

The Best Orchids for Indoors

Written in cooperation with the American Orchid Society and photographed by Charles Marden Fitch, one of the world's foremost orchid photographers, this book provides valuable guidance in selecting gorgeous orchids that will thrive in your home and offers tips on growing each orchid type. (For more information on successful orchid cultivation in the home or greenhouse, see the companion volume The Gardener's Guide to Growing Orchids (# 178).)

Pruning Trees, Shrubs, and Vines

Understanding when and how to prune is an important part of creating a flourishing garden, whether you are shaping flowering shrubs, grooming a formal hedge, limbing up a tree, taming exuberant vines, or bringing a long-neglected rose back to life. This easy-to-follow guide takes the guesswork out of snipping, sawing, and slicing as it introduces readers to the fundamentals of plant growth and explains the essential techniques for all major pruning tasks. This book will help you make informed pruning decisions and keep the plants in your yard looking their natural best.

The Butterfly Gardener's Guide

Edited by Claire Hagen Dole, this book provides detailed information on how to transform your garden into a haven for butterflies, including hard-to-find information on caterpillars and their food plants. Regional experts describe their own butterfly gardens and the native plants that caterpillars and butterflies love. Specialty gardens, including herb gardens, children's gardens, and wildflower meadows, are profiled as well.

Annuals for Every Garden

Dazzling with an infinite variety of colors and forms, annuals are some of the most versatile garden plants. In this book you'll encounter hundreds of enchanting classic and cutting-edge bloomers for a long season of brilliant color and fragrance. Whether you'd like to create a spectacular ever-changing annual border, design a drought-resistant display, lighten up a shady border, or enjoy an evening garden, you'll find the plants that are just right for the job—plus suggestions on how to combine them for the most unforgettable displays.

Spring-Blooming Bulbs: An A to Z Guide to Classic and Unusual Bulbs for Your Spring Garden

These bulbs are among the first brave flowers to poke through the snow in early spring, as well as some of the most unusual and spectacular bloomers for the garden. This book spotlights these important and reliable garden plants and emphasizes many lovely unusual bulbs that are often omitted from other guides. Readers will learn how to combine these plants with more familiar garden plants in beds and borders and other garden areas, to make the most of their bloom time and to set off their special qualities. Available in December.

The Sunny Border: Sun-Loving Perennials for Season-Long Color

Edited by one of North America's leading gardeners and landscape architects, C. Colston Burrell, this handbook celebrates the joys of gardens in the sun. It presents design ideas for combining perennials with annual flowers, grasses, ferns, and shrubs, and features an encyclopedia of more than 100 dramatic plants and information specific to every North American region.

Gourmet Vegetables: Smart Tips and Tasty Picks for Gardeners and Gourmet Cooks

Anne Raver, The New York Times columnist and one of America's best-loved garden writers, has put together a handbook that celebrates the savory, homegrown tastes of North America's cosmopolitan cuisine, from ancient black Aztec corn to Osaka purple mustard greens. Both gardeners and gourmands will relish this luscious volume written by leading gardeners, growers, and chefs, including Eliot Coleman, Renee Shepard, and Shep Ogden. Scrumptious recipes include Fennel and Pea Sauté and Tuscan-Style Shiitake Mushrooms.

Essential Tools: Equipment and Supplies for Home Gardeners

This no-nonsense guide to everything from classic bamboo rakes to high-tech, high-carbon steel shovels provides tips on what's indispensable for every gardener according to his or her size, strength, climate, and gardening goals. Plus, experts pick their six can't-live-without tools.

Summer-Blooming Bulbs: Scores of Spectacular Bloomers for Your Summer Garden

After the riotous spring blooms fade, many gardeners assume the bulb display is finished for the year. This colorful guide features scores of spectacular bulbs that light up the summer garden—not only the familiar lily and gladiolus but also exotic flowers such as South African natives Tulbaghia and Near Eastern and Asian beauties Eremurus and Colocasia.

The Potted Garden: New Plants and New Approaches for Container Gardens

"[A] practical, readable, and comprehensive handbook that will bring out the green thumb in anyone. What's exciting is the inclusion of lush photos and fresh ideas for unusual plant selections and potting materials, which will appeal to gardeners of varying levels of experience."—Library Journal

Gourmet Herbs: Classic and Unusual Herbs for Your Garden and Your Table

"Don that chef's apron, pull on those gardening gloves, and get ready to harvest a wealth of herbal information that will spice up the kitchen and beautify the garden."—Booklist

For gardeners and gourmands alike, this handsome guide is full of practical advice on growing, preserving, and cooking with classic as well as unusual, hard-to-obtain herbs at the heart of international cuisine.

Japanese-Inspired Gardens: Adapting Japan's Design Traditions for Your Garden

"This guide will enable the gardener to design a Japanese-style landscape that acknowledges its inspiration without resorting to stereotypical cliches."—Booklist

Landscaping Indoors: Bringing the Garden Inside

This book reveals the secrets to creating a lush indoor garden, from setting up a Wardian case for ferns and orchids to growing oranges and bamboo.

Natural Disease Control: A Common-sense Approach to Plant First Aid

Expert pathologists from across the continent explain how to identify the diseases that plague your plants—and how to treat them effectively using the least toxic controls available today.

Hummingbird Gardens: Turning Your Yard Into Hummingbird Heaven

Experts from the National Audubon Society and BBG tell you how to attract hummingbirds to your garden by planting the flowers they love.

Old-Fashioned Flowers: Classic Blossoms to Grow in Your Garden

A guide to growing scores of captivating plants from the past—from vintage rose varieties to sweet peas to phlox.

Chile Peppers: Hot Tips and Tasty Picks for Gardeners and Gourmets

This beautifully illustrated guide tells you everything you need to know to grow 50 varieties of tongue-tingling pods, from mild jalapeños to fiery hot habaneros.

Easy Lawns: Low Maintenance Native Grasses for Gardeners Everywhere

This groundbreaking guide tells you all about the native grasses and hedges that allow you to have a beautiful lawn without endless hours of mowing, watering, fertilizing, and applying pesticides.

Wildflower Gardens: 60 Spectacular Plants and How to Grow Them in Your Garden

Learn how to design beautiful wildflower gardens, from beds and borders to meadows and bogs.

Flowering Vines: Beautiful Climbers

This beautifully illustrated guide includes everything you need to know to grow flowering vines that clamber over the garden wall, blanket fences, bestride gateways, and cast cooling shade beneath an arbor.

Starting from Seed: The Natural Gardener's Guide to Propagating Plants

This fully illustrated, easy-to-use guide includes everything you need to know to collect, store, and grow seeds successfully.

Bird Gardens: Welcoming Wild Birds to Your Yard

In this beautifully illustrated guide, National Audubon Society staffers from across the country show you how to attract wild birds that delight with their flashes of color and cheerful song.

The Shady Border: Shade-Loving Perennials for Season-Long Color

This reissue of the first book about how to create a spectacular flower bed in low-light areas of a garden guides the gardener to design intricate, layered tapestries of bloom and foliage for year-round beauty. Under the protection of tree branches, some of the most bewitching plants available grow luxuriantly, producing stunning color, textural combinations, and memorable garden pictures. Updated sources and new photos.

Kitchen Gardens: Beyond the Vegetable Patch

This book discusses vegetables, fruits, flowers, herbs, and stylish garden designs that suit your climate.

Easy Compost: The Secret to Great Soil and Spectacular Plants

This guide offers expert advice on this natural process while shattering some long-held myths and includes composting tips for small spaces and a buyer's guide to equipment.

Growing Conifers: Four-Season Plants

This essential guide helps you select versatile, low-maintenance conifers that will set your garden's stage—every day of the year.

The Natural Water Garden: Pools, Ponds, Marshes & Bogs for Backyards Everywhere

This guide shows how to mimic wetland habitats using spectacular moisture-loving plants.

Tantalizing Tomatoes: Smart Tips & Tasty Picks

Here's everything you need to know about growing America's favorite vegetable in your area—along with delicious recipes.

Bulbs for Indoors: Year-round Windowsill Splendor

Learn how to force tulips, hyacinths, and other hardy bulbs for a head-start on spring, and how to grow rare tender bulbs that bloom year-round.

Growing Fruits: Nature's Desserts

Learn step by step how to grow fresh fruits bursting with ambrosial juices, from planting to pruning to harvesting.

Native Perennials: North American Beauties

This guide tells you how to grow and design a garden with native perennials.

Woodland Gardens: Shade Gets Chic

This groundbreaking guide shows you how to work with nature to design and maintain a shady woodland garden.

Butterfly Gardens: Luring Nature's Loveliest Pollinators to Your Yard

Detailed, practical information on dozens of butterflies—all spectacularly illustrated in color.

Easy-Care Roses: Low-Maintenance Charmers

Experts from around the country instruct how to grow gorgeous roses without all the fuss.

Shrubs: The New Glamour Plants

Learn how to design your garden effectively with shrubs that provide shape color, texture, and even fragrance.

Going Native: Biodiversity in Our Own Backyards

Top natural landscape designers tell you how to create gardens that are refuges for disappearing wildflowers and wildlife.

Natural Insect Control: The Ecological Gardener's Guide to Foiling Pests

This handy guide shows you nontoxic ways to keep bugs at bay.

Ferns: Wild Things Make a Comeback in the Garden

Indoor Bonsai: How to Succeed With Bonsai Grown Inside Your Home

The concept of indoor bonsai is an American innovation that was largely developed by Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Written by North America's foremost bonsai pioneers, this reissued illustrated guide to growing and keeping miniature trees thriving provides advice on everything from artificial light to fertilizer to mastering wiring techniques and what to do when a bonsai owner goes on vacation. Includes more than 150 recommended plants for indoor bonsai.

Orchids for the Home & Greenhouse

Windowsill, greenhouse, and outdoor growing tips.

Bonsai: Special Techniques

A guide to advanced techniques.