Written by:
Leah Wingenroth
In anticipation of summer’s arrival, we’ve added several new books to our store all about nature, gardening and eating well. Take advantage of the abundance that the growing season has to offer, and check out all our new arrivals to learn how to eat better and live better this season.
The Kinfolk Garden: How to live with Nature by John Burns
Featuring 30 inspirational people and places around the globe, The Kinfolk Garden offers an easy approach to bringing nature into your life. This latest book from the team behind Kinfolk Magazine focuses on beautiful spaces that bring the outdoors in and the indoors out. Divided into chapters on care, creativity and community, the book explores the garden as a place for work, play, entertaining and inspiration. Discover lush gardens and plant-filled homes, meet the inspiring people who coax them into bloom and learn from the experts about everything from arranging to eating plants and flowers.
Root, Nurture, Grow: The Essential Guide to Propagating and Sharing Houseplants by Caro Langton
This stylish handbook shows you how to make the most of your favourite houseplants through simple, beginner-friendly propagation techniques such as stem cutting, rooting in water, runners, offsets, grafting, division and more, as well as resourceful DIY projects including homemade rooting mediums, seed-bombs, and a self-watering plant pot. Root, Nurture, Grow shows you how to look after and nurture your new plant babies and how to share them with friends by making beautiful gifts and displays.
The Garden Chef: Recipes and Stories from Plant to Plate by Phaidon Books
Phaidon’s newest print serves as an exclusive glimpse into the gardens of the world’s leading restaurants and access to innovative recipes inspired by them. For many chefs, their gardens are a direct extension of their kitchens. These fertile spots provide the ingredients and inspiration for countless seasonal dishes, whether a small rooftop in the city for growing herbs and spices or a larger plot with fruit trees and vegetables. The Garden Chef includes more than 100 imaginative garden-focused recipes from the featured restaurants and explores how 40 of the world’s top chefs cook with ingredients they choose to grow in their gardens and provides a unique source of inspiration for green-fingered food-lovers.
Grow Fruit & Vegetables in Pots by Aaron Bertelsen
Beautifully illustrated, Grow Fruit & Vegetables in Pots provides clear, practical information on growing fruit and vegetables in containers, whether that be a window box or a terracotta pot on a balcony. Aaron Bertelsen of the acclaimed English garden at Great Dixter will guide you through what to grow, which pots to use, give personal tips on varieties to choose from, and advice on cultivation and care. Featuring more than 50 delicious recipes, Bertelsen shows that lack of space is no barrier to growing what you want to eat and proves that harvesting and cooking food you have grown yourself is a total pleasure, with dishes that showcase a few perfectly chosen and personally grown ingredients.
Flower Color Guide by Darroch and Michael Putnam
If you’re planning a wedding, a dinner, a party, a romantic evening, or just arranging flowers for the pleasure of having them, more often than not, your creative process begins with thinking about the colour of the flowers that you want. To help you find what you are looking for, Flower Color Guide is the first reference book to organize flower types by colour, with an emphasis on seasonality and creative colour schemes - and the results are stunning in their sheer variety. What Pantone is to pigments, Flower Color Guide is to flowers.
Showcasing 400 flowers at their peak with stunning photography taken by Putnam & Putnam in their Brooklyn studio, this guide includes a perforated appendix with tips on flower care, notes on preparing vessels, and a list of suggested colour schemes. A great gift to give or to have for oneself, the book speaks to the most seasoned flower enthusiasts and those just beginning to explore the possibilities of arranging flowers.
Living in Nature: Contemporary Houses in the Natural World by Phaidon Books
Another new acquisition from Phaidon, Living in Nature showcases a selection of architect-designed houses with something fundamental in common: a special relationship with the natural world. Each of the book’s 50 homes is carefully chosen for its stunning location, whether cocooned within the earth itself or soaring high amongst treetops, surrounded by cooling waters, or resisting the desert heat. With a wealth of photographs showcasing each house inside and out, Living in Nature offers inspiration and tranquillity.
Whole Food Cooking Every Day by Amy Chaplin
Eating whole foods can transform a diet, and mastering the art of cooking these foods can be easy with the proper techniques and strategies. In 20 chapters, Chaplin shares ingenious recipes incorporating the foods that are key to a healthy diet: seeds and nuts, fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and other plant-based foods. Chaplin offers her secrets for eating healthy every day: mastering some key recipes and reliable techniques and then varying the ingredients based on the occasion, the season, and what you’re craving.
Once the reader learns one of Chaplin’s base recipes, whether for gluten-free muffins, millet porridge, or baked marinated tempeh, the ways to adapt and customize it are endless: change the fruit depending on the season, include nuts or seeds for extra protein, or even change the dressing or flavouring to keep a diet varied. Chaplin encourages readers to seek out local and organic ingredients, stock their pantries with nutrient-rich whole food ingredients, prep ahead of time, and, most importantly, cook at home.
