Rambunctious Garden: Things I Disagree With

In my review of "Rambunctious Garden" by Emma Marris I got a comment by user Skr and I've decided to give this more attention as my reply started fleshing out into a small book. Overall I feel like everyone is enjoying this book but me so maybe I'm just stubborn. I don't mean this to single anyone out but I feel it's worthy of a topic in itself.  

First off to Skr only:  If you have a blog, or website (Flickr album?) you'd like me to list I'd be more than happy to include it. Also if you find you have a reply to this that turns into a short story of it's own I'd be happy to post it as a guest post. Should either be the case e-mail me at MrILoveTheAnts @ yahoo.com

Skr said...

Marris argues that invasives generally cause very little damage and extinctions from invasives are rare. She cites studied that show that even on islands the biodiversity increases after the introduction of invasive plant species. 

I know I've changed the title of my blog to Biodiverse gardens but I feel like the term gets thrown around as though more of it is a mark of success. Incorporating species that cannot be digested, let alone recognized as food, by indigenous animals is counterproductive. Nonnatives often do nothing but take up space and can ruin the sense of place. Most herbivores are generalists and will give anything a nibble at least once. Marris focuses entirely on these larger animals to support her claims, but she completely ignores insect life though and they are fundamental to the food web. Without them they render non fruiting shade trees useless. There are 285 species of caterpillar that eat our native Maples, the imported Norway Maple only hosts significantly fewer. Among those mentioned are Leaf Rollers, Cankerworm, and Tent Caterpillars, all of whom are generalists eating a wide variety of tree species and have a preference for our native species. We can argue that 286 species of caterpillar are simply speeding up the process of mulch production but at least they double as bird food.

Pound per pound insects have twice as much protein in them as other animal meats. They are the number one food item fed to baby birds, and are a favorite among reptiles, amphibians, fish, and so on. If you don't have an abundance of insects, it can send ripples through the food web.   

I like to compare this to eating at the mall food court. Here we have an assortment of food cuisines to pick from but the average person doesn't eat them all. Personally I can't stomach most Mexican food, I'm afraid to try anything Asian, and I've never given Indian food any thought. Insects who typically only have a few weeks to get it right before they die have to lay their eggs in the right spot, or on the right plant, and they have to eat the correct diet for the simple fact that they can't eat anything else. In most cases this is only a hand full of plants, that are almost always in genera that they've closely evolved with.

An example Emma gives to support the benefit of nonnatives is Rodrigues island, found about 350 miles east of Mauritius island off the coast of Madagascar. It is in her book on page 97-98. 

View Larger Map
This massive island was supposidly logged, and then supposidly replanted? To be perfectly honest I don't see how either could be done effectively. We're not talking about just an island so much as a small city. She might as well be talking about Hawaii again. Had her book included pictures it might have been apparent to everyone that she was talking about an island inhabited by people.

There are paved roads, houses, air ports, farms, mountains, what look to be beach side resorts. None of this was mentioned in her book. So this is no longer a simple matter of adding and subtracting trees. How many of these people have bird feeders? How many put out bird houses? When she talks about replanting does she mean the bustling agricultural farms scattered all over the island? Are these nonnative trees simply common landscaping plants I can find at my local nursery? She might as well be talking about where I live in New Jersey. We have fragmented forests of native trees, and all the clearings are landscaped with mostly nonnative plants. I even doubt the people who planted them put any thought into their origin.

Wikipedia seems to think the bird issue she mentions was due to over hunting and overgrazing by livestock, not so much logging. Regardless, the issue was habitat lose and we don't regain that with alien species. Emma doesn't seem to mention anything about their conservation efforts to maintain some of their remaining threatened species. Or the captive breeding program for her bat species she mentions. They were eating the fruit to some of the nonnatives such as rose apple, which these birds and bats were likely helping to spread around the island. She just assumes because the bat was eating the nonnative fruits that that's what saved the species. It's a fruit bat, I doubt it cars what it's eating so long as it's fruit.

She ends by saying, "The exotics turned out to help rather than hinder, but prejudice against them was so strong that instead of thanks, they are getting the ax." Correct, god forbid a society try to learn from it's mistakes and give conservation a chance in some attempt at a more predictable wilderness. Had they not over logged the forests to begin with they wouldn't have had any problems. Was that breeding program doing nothing for the bat population? For her to suggest that these nonnative trees were the only factor is misleading.

Further more, I would love to know the exact kind of efforts are being made to control the nonnatives. Because Rose Apple is a food crop I find it hard to believe that they'd totally ban it from the island, unless they've become an island of die hard conservationists, which is a theme she has been quoted as saying. What would make sense to me is that they clear it out from specific areas meant for conservation and still grow it as a viable crop, perhaps even make efforts to hinder it's spread by the animals somehow. You restore habitat by establishing and promoting what has historically grown and worked there to reestablish the norms that sustained it. Fruit and Nectar don't mean nearly as much as the indigenous insect populations and you get that by promoting the native food plants they evolved with.

She eventually follows up by talking about Pyura praeputialis, some sort of sea mussel from what I can gather, and how it's displacing Perumytilus purpuratus. However indigenous starfish and such have already taken a liking to the nonnative and it's looking like things are slowly coming back into balance. This is a 10 times better an example than what's going on in Rodrigues. The trouble I doubt the starfish and such that eat them care which mussel species they feed upon. Everything that supports her claim tend to be generalists who eat a broad range of foods.

In other chapters she talks about how cats and rats and sometimes snakes are awful on islands because they cause mass extinctions of bird populations.

So what is she talking about now? Nonnatives are good and bad sometimes? I really don't get what she's trying to say with this issue other than it's confusing.

You completely missed the point of the first chapter.

I don't deny I missed the point of the first chapter. As I wrote in my review I was ready to throw her book in the trash until chapter 2 or 3 came along and things took a dramatic up turn.

She was setting up the invasive argument by highlighting that species distribution is by chance and it's a matter of which species gets there first and these distributions can change radically over geologic timescales this making any baseline attribution completely arbitrary and without intrinsic value.

I loved hearing about different conservation efforts around the world. For me that's the only real highlight and saving grace of this book. She kept concluding though that it's all a waste of time in the grand scheme of things. It really got annoying. If a nose fell off Mt. Rushmore I'd like to think someone would fix it.

Baselines at least give someone an idea of what standards need to be upheld. Every gardener has them even if their goals are short term and change from year to year. National parks happen to be more strict about them. 

Since you stopped halfway through the last chapter, you apparently missed the fact that she advocates for protection of biodiversity and native species, argues for increased plantings of native species especially through the elimination of lawns. She just thinks that becoming apoplectic because someone planted Pennisetum setaceum is a waste of valuable resources.

Picking the book back up now I found that I'd left off at her suggested goal #6 of 7. So I wasn't that far from the end, it's just that chapter reads like an appendix. Encouraging people to plant native was an afterthought at best. She should have had more to say on it sooner in the meat of the book.

I am for a more generalized view of what's native but the idea of including plants that didn't evolve on the same continent is a silly idea. The only exception I make to this rule is with food plants I know I'm going to control and eat. I feel like if the whole world followed this rule we'd be in a lot better shape.

I don't scoff when people plant nonnative plants, but I feel something should be done about people who actively import them without permits.

Book Review: "Rambunctious Garden" by Emma Marris

"Rambunctious Garden" by Emma Marris starts out as an excellent read on conservation issues around the world, but then takes an odd turn halfway through that sadly never returns to it's former greatness. Leave it to a chapter on invasive species to ruin a good thing. I wish the format of the book were laid out somewhat differently. For starters there are no pictures, which is a real issue considering the author traveled around the world. Did she really not bring a camera? Images would have helped when she talks about some of these invasive plants from foreign places. Plants are otherwise only mentioned by common name, and I consider that to be a serious no no when writing to an informed audience. Also she presents information in an odd way, her voice is more of a reporter and I get the feeling this was intended to be a documentary at one point because it doesn't always work in a novel format. This laid back reporter tone only makes the abrupt switch in tone more noticeable come chapter 6.


So Here's How it Went:
By the end of chapter one I honestly wanted to throw this book in the trash. Her argument that conservation is an arbitrary thing is interesting but lacks sufficient evidence early on to be taken seriously. She comes off more as someone attending a tour of a nature preserve who raises their hand and goes, "Well a million years ago there was ice a mile high where we're standing ... what's that say about your conservation efforts?" She's almost rude about it. I'll admit I never thought about conservation in as broad an historic sense as she talks about, but why bring it up at all? She might as well have elaborated that in dinosaurs once walked the earth, or even further and said the earth used to not exist. What is your point?

Following the old librarian rule that you have to read at least to page 50 before you can stop reading, I pressed on. Halfway though chapter two things started falling into place. I was getting it. Her argument is hard to talk about without a few examples, and to my delight it feels like she gives you 100 of them all while telling the history of the conservationist movement. Chapters 2 through 5 are an absolute delight to read. She tells the formation of Yellow Stone, she travels around the world looking at different ideas and concepts of conservation, all of which is fascinating and each one worthy of it's own book. She talks about issues facing conservation, why picking some date out of the history books is arbitrary given the history of the earth so far, and she makes each point beautify.

To elaborate, in North America the general definition of what we consider to be native. Most conservationists agree anything living in North America before Christopher Columbus first stepped food here is native. However, at the time North America was currently inhabited by more Native Americans than there were people living in Europe. Smallpox devastated 95% of their population in the first 100 years of interaction with European settlers! During the time prior to European colonization, Native Americans were setting fires across the continuant to make prairie land to boost game populations, and had already driven several large mammals into extinction. These large mammals interacted with the plant life here differently, distributing seeds, shaping the land, and functioning in ecosystems in ways now lost to history. In essence some of our native trees aren't as abundant today as they should be because the beast eating and distributing their seeds have gone extinct. Generally humans have had their hands in everything, everywhere on earth, and this idea of a pristine wilderness is a delusion at best. When Yellow Stone was first formed they had to relocate people off the park land, not just Native Americans, small towns worth of people were kicked out of their homes!

For many examples she's delivering a level of detail that's just shy of being compared to that found in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. And one thing she makes clear is preserving this one glimpse of human history is a pipe dream at best. Issues like climate change are changing whole ecosystems, how much rain fall, the average temp, really drive home that at some point compromises have to be made. I wanted to read more about these complex issues facing so called pristine environments around the world! When one looks at the big picture we realize that the earth is still spinning, things are changing. What will the future ecosystem be in a given area? Sadly Chapter 6 comes along.

Chapter 6: Learning to Love Exotic Species. This chapter really breaks up the rhythm. It's 13 pages long and too ambitious. It's also where her dangerously vague definition of what native is severely hurts her integrity. The broad overview of the world only helps to blur the lines even more. If we're talking about plants native to a continent or mountain range, then I'm all for it's introduction, spreading, and incorporation in any environment or ecosystem reasonably adjacent to it's native range. Sadly the author never makes any such claims, and she might as well be talking about the environmental benefits sterile double flowering cultivars would be if planted on the moon. She's trying to say 'nature is all around us and worth exploring and protecting regardless of where we find it, and where it is from,' fine okay I can buy that. But this is so different idea than, 'here are issues facing conservationists today.'

We open with a vague example of an island getting logged, and replanted with nonnative plant somewhat picked at convenience. These faster growing nonnative trees supposidly saved 2 species of bird and 1 species of bad, hallelujah. But that is all the information we're given, end of story, moving on, stop asking questions, nonnatives are great, thank you, okay you really want to know... magic beans, moving on. There isn't any citation for this example at all. Could the bats and birds fly off of the island? If that's the case then really I don't think anyone would have cared had the island simply eroded away. Where those three species the only thing worth studying on the island?

She addresses invasive species in such an idiotic way. She mentions several of them in a single paragraph, giving a sentance worth of them to each. And she writes they're really not that big a deal because: trying to weed them out is a waste of money. And that Invasive species only cause extinctions on islands, in lakes, or in fragmented forests. The rest is mostly a series of success stories where fast growing aggressive introduced species benefiting the environment or were a waste of money to get rid of in the first place ... by which she means birds nest in trees, and don't care what kind of trees they are. The problem here is that birds will also nest along sky scrapers in New York City. All her examples lack sufficient evidence that nonnatives are superior to natives. She directly sites examples in Doug Tallamy's "Bringing Nature Home" as success stories for her claim. Nonnatives being imported simply as erosion control. The problem being ignored here is not enough people are growing/supplying or using the native plants that were preventing the hillside from eroding in the first place. (Prairie Moon Nursery sells a variety of native seed mixes that could be used as opposed to planting nothing but nonnative Scotch Broom.)
  
From here we find a series of examples where compromise turned out to be beneficial. Drilling nest holes into the sides of a cliff for birds so they have more places to reproduce and hopefully out compete the rats, for example. This is the kind of success story I don't mind becuase it's a cheap way to ignore (fix?) the problem of invasive rat species on islands. But these types of examples lack the sense of value and history conservationists try to preserve.

She goes on to support assisted migration. This is an interesting parallel here between intentionally introducing nonnative species. But that is hardly evidence that introduced species overall are beneficial to the environment. It's one thing to do it to save an endangered or threatened species, and quite another for mass marketed landscaping plants. The illegal pet trade and accidental introduction through human commerce are mixed in here someplace but not really addressed fully. Not that she needs to. Take your pick of life form and you can be sure someone's imported it.

Chapter 9: I think this is supposed to be read as an enlightening kayak trip down a river teaming with introduced species, factories polluting the waters, and conservation projects all going on at once. Besides reflecting the world as it is, I don't think this chapter had it's intended impact on me. Basically she comes to the conclusion that we have to incorporate nature into our lives.

The last chapter reads as a laundry list of goals one can have towards plants. I thought it was a waste of paper, got bored after goal #6 and stopped reading after that. 

Forests are fragmented to the point that their ecosystems are islands. That's why invasive species are bad and people should be doing more to fight them, not ignore them! When someone tracks mud through your house you don't throw up your arms and never clean the mess. Perhaps comparing invasives would be better compared to a hotel infested with cockroaches. You'll never be rid of them unless everyone allows their apartment to be sprayed with insecticide. If one person refuses then the cockroaches have a safe harbor and eventually will infest the whole building again, it's hopeless. But this is such a limited view. We should ask, why is this species invasive? The answer is, as the author tries to say, it's because it's doing what it would normally be doing in nature. It's thriving in an environment where it's absolutely flourishing.

The difference between a nature preserve and your front lawn is competition. Your front lawn is doing everything land after a massive forest fire, mud slide, or volcanic eruption would do. It's a disturbed environment with lots of open spaces that need filling. Weather it's native or not, aggressive plant species are going to show up and try and fill those holes. The longterm process of succession is about to commence. As the author points out during the time of the book I liked, some of these trees live for 1,400+ years! Climate change has been found to interrupt some of these species and we find places where the oldest of these tree species are only ~700 years old.

Another issue that the author doesn't address is that there a coloration between the % of species and the % of land available. If we lose 1% of land then we lose 1% of the species there. Condoning nonnative species to establish, weather they're behaving aggressively or not, they eventually kick out other species. Often because native insects don't recognize them as palatable something is lost, weather it's the quantity of the insect, or the insect's prescience there entirely. The author seems to think insects and diseases will eventually catch up with them, either by importation or one of the indigenous species taking a liking to them suddenly. And that's true enough but that doesn't mean we should let it have free reign over the continent for 500 years or more waiting for it to happen. What's more such plants are not worth protecting as the author suggests! To be fair she's talking about trees in general, not aggressive species in particular; basically nature deserves protecting despite it's content of origin. What's lacking with this idea is standards, value, and any real vision. I guess that's what chapter 10's list of goals is trying to get at, but her treatment of nonnatives, and invasive plants especially, really cripples the idea in my mind. Imagine a nature preserve that's comprised of Kudzu blanketing over dead trees it's turned into topiary corpses. 

Preview: "The Ecology and Managment of Prairies in the Central United States" by Chris Helzer

This is a book I'm currently reading. I might get to seriously reviewing it in detail at a later date but for now I feel like I've read enough. Bare in mind I'm from New Jersey. The target audience of this book is people with a lot of land living in the Tallgrass prairie region of the US, and some of the mixed grass region farther west. This includes North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa... with a touch of Arkansas and Indiana in there. And you'd think it would be fascinating to hear how prairies differ in such a wide range. However what's missing from this book seems to be the author himself, Chris Helzer. That is a shame because I really enjoy reading his blog, The Prairie Ecologist.

The author warns people to use local plant guides rather than ones covering a broader region because they tend to be to vague. Ironically that's also the problem here as it reads like a series of essays. The methods of managing a prairie, their consequences, and factors are all discussed. But what's lacking are examples from the author's own experience. There are no stories or comments given by the author to demonstrate any of the points. And I feel these would have helped break up the monotony a little.

To be fair Haying, Mowing, Prescribed Fires, Grazing, Using Herbicides, and out right doing nothing at all, will all yield different results if done at different times of the year, in various combinations, and if repeated the next season or not; and these will effect different plants differently. But he says it's not important for anyone to be expected to identify 150 to 300 species of plant so long as there are that many species present. This is a complex process and Chris Helzer doesn't make it any less confusing. It's really hard to get an idea that doing any of this will do anything. 


Here's an example. He discusses the use of haying or mowing to control weeds. (First off I he doesn't explain what haying is but I gather it's just like mowing but at a higher height and so that the plant cuttings are not returned to the soil. Non farmers might not know this.) He doesn't really offer any opinions on it. Doing it in the spring, summer, or fall can be both positive and negative to balancing grasses over forbs (non-woody flowering plants) as research has shown. He mentions the process over the summer and early fall time will likely kill grassland nesting birds or make them more vulnerable to predators. But this only seems to be a bad thing if you care about those birds.

Another gripe I have is the lack of species names. There's an appendix in the back that lists the species names to common names mentioned in this book. That's okay I guess, but it would be nice to know the genus and species name of plants like "Smooth Brome" when I come across it. 

I don't want to discourage him from writing, I just wish this book read more like his blog.

Book Review: Urban and Suburban Meadows by Catherine Zimmerman

Urban and Suburban Meadows: Bringing Meadowscaping to Big and Small Spaces by Catherine Zimmerman

This is an excellent book on the topic of installing a meadow or prairie in urban and suburban locations. I found it to be a simple and quick read. Catherine has a quick and to the point manner or writing. A lot of the chapters read as instructional "how to" guides. This is contrasted with loads of beautiful photos, many of which showcase the works of professional landscape designers who have installed meadows and prairies.

Though the words meadow and prairie are used interchangeable throughout the book, Catherine does make the distinction. Meadows are more common in the eastern North America and are the result of fires clearing holes in forests so that meadow plants take over and establish for a few years. If left to itself the forest would eventually close in and reclaim this land. Prairies, despite being the French word for Meadow, tend to be more set in stone. They occur in areas that get so little rainfall or soil conditions are so poor that few if any woody trees and shrubs can grow there. The look and feel for both though can be the same or so similar that it's not worth making the destination.

Catherine gives a brief summary of why we should only use native plants and allow natural processes to occur. She doesn't go into to much detail other than to say it's to fight weeds and nonnatives take more energy to use. Doug Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants, Updated and Expanded goes into way more detail on this topic but his writing style is completely different, and Doug doesn't explain how to install a meadow either.

The book goes over everything from site preparation, species selection, design ascetic, long term costs, and even how to biannually set fire to your meadow to control weeds. Fighting weeds is a reoccurring theme in the book. Different methods have to be used depending on weather you planted seeds, plugs, or full grown perennials. They vary from annual mowing, mulching, to burning. When it does come to burning it's really only worth the effort if your meadow is more than an acer or so, otherwise mowing in the early spring is usually all that's required. She also stresses that controlled burns should always be done by professionals and to check with local authorities on obtaining permits before hand.

Planting guides are listed but I found her keys to be less than ideal. America is broken up into several sections, which is nice. But this is fallowed with a long plant list and colored boxes represent the regions. This is okay but breaking the country down this way demands almost every plant to have "minus: this state, this state, and this state" next to it. 

Thankfully there are extensive lists of resources, plant nurseries, and natural areas, for every state, except for Alaska and Hawaii.

All and all I found this book to be an easy read, it only took 2 days for me to get through all 271 pages. There are loads of fantastic photos to stress the points in each chapter. I found it highly informative and inspirational. I'm even looking at potential spots to install one a pocket prairie of my own.

Here is a video I found to be relevant to the topics found in this book.

Book Review: The Family Kitchen Garden

The Family Kitchen Garden: How to Plant, Grow, and Cook Together
By Karen Liebreich, Jutta Wagner, and Annette Wendland.

I found this to be a good guide for anyone interested in growing their own fruits and vegetables. It's written in a simple language and covers most of the basics. A true novice, as in someone who lived in the city all their life, might be overwhelmed with some of the info. But over all I think it's a great place for a young gardener to start out. It's better to have the info than not after all.



The first 51 pages are devoted to defining terms and discusses issues like children in the garden. They discuss assorted soil types, how to improve it, composting and so on. Propagation is covered, namely the difference between seeds, division and cuttings, that sort of thing. So these are all things every gardener should know.

The next 100+ pages are probably the most useful. It's a month by month list of what to plant inside, what to plant outside, what to harvest, what maintenance needs to be done, what fun craft things can be done, and even offers a recipe or two. I haven't tried any of the crafts but they're casual little things I could see people doing. They're geared towards garden things like simple bird feeders and plant labels.

What to plant and when seems to be in order, though this book is based in the UK which strangely enough has a climate more similar to the southern US. For those of you living in USDA growing zone 6 and up I'd say do things a month late. Those of you in zone 4 and up give it two months and so on as conditions allow. They're at least in some sort of an order after all.

Recipes I haven't tried because a lot of them call for things I don't grow, like rhubarb. Most months only have 1 recipe, some have 2; and they all lean towards vegetarian. One has shrimp in it though. To their benefit they all seem easy to prepare, but I feel as if the authors missed an opportunity to really make this book shine. I would have loved if they'd thrown in a few easy to prepare proteins and sauce recipes to show how flexible cooking can be, and how interchangeable some items are on the dinner plate. But this is a gardening book and perhaps that's a topic for another tomb.

The last third of the book is a dictionary of plants. Simple things like apples, borage, mint, tomato, squash and so on are all categorized here. How to grow, how to propagate, what varieties are available (though limited), and what types of pests they get can all be found here. The only notable omission from the normal things we grow seems to be water melon. Corn is found under "S" for Sweet Corn. But what it lacks here it makes up for with some obscure plants like gooseberry, currant, and parsnips. Though they're not really obscure I'd say not everyone is growing them. Fruiting trees are also covered, as are the convenient ways to train the branches so even people with small yards can grow them. Herbs and Flowers (some of which are edible) are the last bit.

So I would recommend this book to a friend or even gift it to a new gardeners.

Gaia's Garden (Book Review, It Sucked)

In all honesty I tried very hard to read this book, in fact I'll very likely be returning to read chapters here and there. But I feel I've read enough that I can voice an opinion. The book is
Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture

by Toby Hemenway

I would love to recommend this book but I just can't. It's so highly overrated on Amazon, and brings up mixed feelings in me. The book is about Food Forests and Permaculture, that is growing the most bang for your buck. The problem is the author suggests using to many nonnative plants that are the cause of current environmental problems. It's a healthier environment to have a forest but we're already landscaping homes with nonnatives as it is.

It's an easy read but reminds me to much of a text book. Each chapter starts with a few good paragraphs of useful information usually fallowed by more boring details that drive yet another nail into the coffin. Some people may like this attention to detail so that's not really a fault. I always appreciate having a book around that acts as a reference I've already read books that explained it simpler and in funner ways.

He's somehow managed to make grdening a very boring subject. Picture for a moment your garden putting out 100% efficiency. There is no lawn to speak of. There are pathways laid out in a diagonal 10 by 10 grid. Each 10 by 10 square of soil has it's own hill with a fruit tree growing on it. Around each fruit tree are an assortment of bushes, herbs, and food crops. In other words the most boring garden ever created. You and Colonel Klink (possibly the name of your dog) will tour the garden every morning at exactly Oh Nine Hundred, clipboard in one hand, garden trowel in the other for the morning inspection. Trees will be pruned, Herbs will be picked, and Sour Grapes will not be tolerated.That is exactly the image this book gives me (without any of the humor).

The problem is a lot of it goes hand and hand and what few images there are in the book usually undermine the paragraphs they go with. For example near the start of this book there are pictures of garden layouts. Picture 1 has a plants in rows with measurements how much wasted space one needs to walk between them. Picture 2 has all the plant rows close together which uses much less space. And Picture 3 shows the garden arranged in a circle with a key hole shaped pathway in the middle and all the rest is plants. Next to these wonderful pictures we have paragraphs about how to save space. Sure it's a smart design but he goes on and on and on with it. A garden of mostly key hole shaped walkways. Who honestly grows 40 herbs, for the purpose of being used as an herb? On and on with the herbs, he can't suggest enough of them. Follow this man's advice and your yard will be supplying India with herbs.

I would have loved this book if he'd just kept it garden designs and kept his plant suggestions to simple plants. In a disappointing way, though, he starts talking about the roles different types of plants play. The different categories of trees, bushes, and mentions some plants attract pollinators, or feed wildlife, or fix nitrogen in the soil. That would have been great had he just left it there, but Oh dear he goes on to start recommend plants. He mentions what a wonderful fence Bamboo will make, how great Perennial Sunflowers are, why Blueberries are fantastic plants. It's great that he named the positives but that's all he mentions! Not once does he mention Blueberry needs acidic soil in order to flower, how Perennial Sunflowers fall over and shade out the plants next to them, or how god awful Bamboo is! Nothing eats bamboo besides Panda! There are varieties of Bamboo that don't spread as violently but you won't find them mentioned in this book. People if you're going to plant bamboo... please please make sure it's completely dead , or that you live in Asia and have a stock of cuddly Pandas or try NOT PLANTING IT. If my neighbors tried planting bamboo along the fence I'd set their garden on fire.

His thoughts on attracting pollinators are sometimes laughably bad but he has a few good suggestions. One recommendation is planting Lilacs to attract bees but he doesn't mention Lilacs are notorious for not blooming sometimes for 8 years or more. He is correct though when they do bloom they do get lots of bees, the trouble is they usually bloom with fruit trees and can be viewed as competition. If you have to many things flowering besides your crops you're not getting enough bees then. He mentions what type of beneficial insects his suggestions attract and it is a nice list. Some plants like Yarrow attract tiny hover flies, and I can attest to that. They're excellent aphid control. But he doesn't really talk about seasons though, or times of blooms. Some herbs and crops he's recommending actually do a fantastic job of attracting pollinators on their own. Radishes, Chives, Onions, Fruit Trees, Melons as well as a number of herbs, Lavender and Mint especially, all do a great job of attracting pollinators! Having some Bee Balm around won't necessarily increase your crop yields. Try planting a much bigger crop to get their attention.

Only mentioning the benefits of plants is a real problem in this book. In the back there's a list of plants where Common Milkweed is listed as edible but what isn't written there is Milkweeds all contain toxins that will cause you to die after suffering from a heart attack. This stuff WILL KILL YOU, YOU WILL BE DEAD unless you boil it until it no longer tastes bitter. Even then I'm not eating it. To omit it's preparation when it's life threatening is just unforgivable. He may as well have listed Fox Glove, Digitalis, as a heart medication. This plant will kill before you've put your cup of tea down if you eat any part of it. Just because a heart medication is made from it though doesn't meant it should simply be listed as such.

As I read more and more about Forest Farming and Permaculture I'd hoped to find something to respark the magical feeling of nature in me. But sadly this book did not achieve it. Forest Farms are easily made with modern varieties of dwarf and semi-dwarf trees. There are YouTube videos that summaries the highlights of this book. It's not hard at all. I really wanted to look into this concept and love it, but I've found nothing but disappointment. It just doesn't compare with walking through a forest of native plants and watching nature do what it does best.

To summaries the concepts, plant a native tree that gets 60 feet tall. Throw in some evergreens while you're at it. In front of them plant as many 30 foot or smaller fruit trees as you can. Assorted fruits are best with multiple varieties of each. Feel free to use grafted 2 in 1 or 5 in 1 (etc...) fruit trees if you like. Below them add bush and thatch crops like Blueberry, Raspberry and so on. Below and around those throw in your annual crops in raised beds and rotate these as needed. If you like grapes or some sort of vine substitute a fruit tree for an arbor. If you live in a small space prune the fruit trees back to small bushes. Follow planting instructions as needed for each plant. That's it.... There's nothing more to it.

In the end you'll be left with a more sustainable property of almost completely alien plants. And I think that's wrong. It's like planting a lie. You have a forest that's better then having nothing at all but for nature it's still not that much better then having just a lawn. Just because a plant is useful doesn't mean you should let it bribe you into keeping it. But somehow that's fine because it's providing for you. But you've gone through all this effort, taken years of your life to plant a forest, including so many nonnative plants is almost like stepping backwards.

It's almost like he wrote a book for the wrong country. Brilliant native plants such as Trilliums have no place in this kind of garden besides being used as toilet paper. His garden designs are for efficiency and lack any concept to them.

Here is another blog that features the only real highlights found in his book. I would only recommend reading this book for that information. As it's already found online though I don't see any need to recommend buying it. He recommends way to many plants without really talking about any of them.