• "Sumptuous book breaks new ground in garden design"

Review excerpt:

This is not just Another Pretty Garden Book, although it is chockablock full of stunning images. Unlike cookie cutter coffee table books with the same plants and same rehashed notions, the Ogdens have filled the text with clear, compelling exposition that really elucidates the ways in to take advantage of the inherent ecological needs of plants to achieve stunning aesthetic ends. This book is utterly new and novel. Everyone talks about design, but the Ogdens deliver the goods: their stellar photography captures the most beautiful North American gardens and crystallizes their salient aspects (microclimate, hardscape, texture and light) showing you how you can recreate many of these artistic habitats in an urban or suburban setting. They have distilled two lifetimes of cutting edge gardening into their copious plant lists and designs--the best new plants used in fresh ways. These speak to all parts of our continent. I am especially excited by the sections on transforming dull lawn space into multidimensional, self sustaining meadows filled with year around color, attracting wildlife and safe for humans! Encyclopaedic in scope, intimate in feel, this is a handbook for creating sustainable, gorgeous, truly American gardens. Every serious gardener, designer or landscape architect in America should own and cherish this book.

(5 Stars)

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• "Love Birds? Invite Them Into Your Yard."

Review excerpt:

Douglas Tallamy was captivated early by the natural world. In his engaging new book, Bringing Nature Home, Tallamy writes of spending his summer days exploring the "wild" places near his home in New Jersey. There, he also discovered the devastating effects of development when a bulldozer buried tiny toads he had watched develop from tadpoles in a polliwog pond. Our hearts go out to the nine-year-old child as he works valiantly, but futilely, to save the little creatures from being buried alive.
When he grew up, the boy who had tried to rescue toads studied the natural world, ultimately becoming Professor and Chair of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware. In the process, he discovered the extent of loss resulting from wide scale development and agricultural activities. And that is the subject of his book. But Bringing Nature Home is not another gloom and doom tome on what we humans have wrought. Instead, this engaging and highly readable book tells us how we can all be involved in turning back environmental loss in a way that will bring that wild world right into our own back yards by simply trading non-native ornamental plantings for native ones.
Bringing Nature Home is very well documented (with a bibliography longer than your arm) and full of beautiful and fascinating photos. It includes many of Tallamy's own personal landscaping experiences as well as numerous suggestions on plant choices for the rest of us.
Like Ted Williams in Wild Moments and Scott Weidensaul in Return to Wild America, Tallamy remains optimistic about the future of America's wildlife. But unlike Williams and Weidensaul, both of whom wrote eloquently about why we should connect with and want to save our natural world, the good professor's book is a prescription on how we can all work to make that happen.

(5 Stars)

Relevancy: 100% (out of 32 total votes) thought this review was helpful.

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