Book Review: Beginner’s Illustrated Guide to Gardening
Beginner’s Illustrated Guide to Gardening by Katie Elzer-Peters 192 pages Cool Springs Press, 2012 List price: $21.99 If you’ve never gardened before and you’re thinking about doing it, the whole…
Beginner's Illustrated Guide to Gardening
by Katie Elzer-Peters
192 pages
Cool Springs Press, 2012
List price: $21.99
If you've never gardened before and you're thinking about doing it, the whole process can be pretty darned intimidating. Sometimes the hardest part of doing something is the starting. Where exactly do you start? Do you need a lot of stuff? What if this happens? So many questions about so many things - it can be enough to make you want to let someone else do it and take up knitting or something.
Gardeners will always tell you, "Oh, it's easy!" But Katie shows you just how easy it is in the Beginner's Illustrated Guide to Gardening. Covering everything from preparing the soil, choosing plants, how to plant, dealing with bugs, growing houseplants, fertilizing, and more, each topic is explained in simple steps with lots of photographs to illustrate each one.
The book's size isn't overwhelming and neither is what's in it. Though a veteran gardener herself, Katie has done a fine job of addressing just about everything a beginning gardener would want to know or would encounter as they begin to grow their own vegetables, flowers, trees, shrubs, or houseplants. There's even a section on lawn care.
Is it a comprehensive guide to all of the above topics? No. It isn't meant to be. But the next time someone asks me if there's a good book to give to a beginning gardener to help them get started, I can think of no better guide to recommend than the Beginner's Illustrated Guide to Gardening.
Katie Elzer-Peters has been gardening since she could walk. She turned that hobby into a career by first pursuing her Bachelor of Science in Horticulture at Purdue University and then her Master of Science in Horticulture through the Longwood Graduate Program at the University of Delaware. After school, Katie managed botanical gardens around the United States. Now she runs a garden marketing and pr business, The Garden of Words, LLC and an online Speaker's Bureau, GreatGardenSpeakers.com.
Read more garden book reviews.
Read Kylee Baumle’s blog, Our Little Acre.
