Leisure time: New garden pleasure between book covers

leisure time
New garden pleasure between book covers

With spring comes the desire to garden. Since the beginning of the year, Internet inquiries about the term “garden” have quadrupled.

According to Google Trends, interest is greatest in Brandenburg and Berlin, followed by Saxony-Anhalt and North Rhine-Westphalia. The pandemic has sparked a passion for gardening in many people. The noticeable climate change, high food prices and growing environmental awareness do the rest to increase the demand for gardening books along with the longing for the green.

In this springtime of books, it feels like there are more books about the garden than snails in the vegetable patch. But the trend is holding up a bit: According to the German Book Trade Association, there were 175 new titles in 2020. And 2016/17 saw even more new garden book releases. This year, too, the range extends from classic guidebooks to bibliophile picture books and cultural-historical considerations.

Sealed gravel gardens are taboo

“Gärtnern im Wandel” is the name of a guide by the Viennese author Veronika Schubert, and the title is programmatic for many new publications on the subject: garden maintenance says goodbye to the former ideal of a neatly cut lawn and well-fertilized flower beds. And sealed gravel gardens do not work at all. It is no longer just the Nature Conservation Union (Nabu) that sees a contribution against the endangerment of bird and insect species in every garden, no matter how small.

The slim volume by Veronika Schubert, published by Servus Verlag in Munich, gives a quick overview of what needs to be done to make the garden climate-proof. While an ornamental lawn needs 20 liters of water per square meter per week, a herb lawn can withstand longer periods of heat and drought and is also mowed much less frequently. The book portrays a selection of five tree species, shrubs, flowering perennials and herbs as the “climate winners”. The rock maple is recommended, for example, the leaves of which can dry up and fall off in prolonged heat. After that it just sprouts again.

The author expects that the greatest challenge will be the cultivation of vegetables because of the water requirement. Because the garden season starts earlier and ends later, the cultivation of vegetables such as cabbage, lamb’s lettuce and spinach can also be extended into winter.

Tomatoes with great attention to detail

The artist Kat Menschik has presented a declaration of love for the tomato. The Berliner, who had already reported in 2014 “about big moments and small defeats in the garden year” under the title “The golden cultivator”, presents 69 tomato varieties. Each of them gets its own color illustration, including the tiny primeval tomato.

In poetic descriptions, Kat Menschik raves about the “fabulous wealth of forms and the perfection that nature can produce”. She combines the book, which was designed with great attention to detail by the publisher Galiani Berlin, with the “call to grow tomatoes yourself, from small varieties for the windowsill, the balcony, the terrace to the large beefsteak tomatoes for the garden and the greenhouse.”

Cultural history of the orchard

The Berlin author Bernd Brunner has dedicated himself to the relationship between fruit trees and people. His book “Taming Fruits”, which was first published in Canada, tells “about the art of taming fruit” – this is the title of the German edition published by Knesebeck Verlag in Munich. The “Cultural History of the Orchard”, as the subtitle reads, takes readers on a richly illustrated journey through time, from fruit growing in the Greeks and Romans to the gardens of kings in the French Baroque and the beginnings of mass production to the rediscovery of old fruit varieties in the present leads.

Orchards have something timeless, the author writes, “because the growth and decay of the trees closely corresponds to that of the people living near them”. Planting a fruit tree brings generations together. The big-city supporters of “urban gardening” also use the experience of the tree grafting of past centuries when grafting on fruit trees. The message that all three gardening books have in common is: Let it grow!

Veronika Schubert: Gardening in transition. How the garden becomes climate-proof. 112 pages. Servus Verlag, Munich 2022. 16.00 euros. ISBN: 13 978-3-71040-311-8

Kat Menschik: Tomatoes. 80 pages. Galiani Berlin 2022. 20.00 euros. ISBN: 978-3-86971-257-4

Bernd Brunner: The art of taming fruit. A cultural history of the orchard. 288 pages. Knesebeck Verlag, Munich. 22.00 euros. ISBN 978-3-95728-566-9

dpa