When You’re Too Tired to Garden – Read!

There are certainly lots of gardening books out there – many generate oohs and ahhs with glorious color and stylish design. This is not one of them. Oh, there are some sweet line drawings, but The Informed Gardener is a reader’s book.

Author Linda Chalker-Scott is an associate professor at Washington State University and specializes in urban horticulture – which is to say, home gardens. For a number of years I have enjoyed her column “Horticultural Myths.” This book collects the best of her nine-year effort. These well-researched articles take some of the things gardeners accepted as True and digs beneath the surface.

Times change; lawn care professionals, tree experts, and university researchers discover that what we were all taught at our mother’s knee or in our college classroom just isn’t true. We all thought it was, and it seemed to work most of the time; but after some years of study and experience, a better way was discovered.

Chalker-Scott has a direct, readable style and the research to back up her perspective. She includes references to the scientific research that illustrates her point. How many garden books and magazine articles do that?

The articles are quick reads and practical. Look for a new take on tree staking, hot-weather watering, mulching, and wound dressing.

The Informed Gardener by Linda Chalker-Scott; University of Washington Press.