Garden Essays

Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on? In Small Fires, Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking—that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books—as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe, beyond words or control.

Pulling Weeds and Patching Life: Confessions from a Crooked Garden What do tangled hoses, runaway chickens, and zucchini the size of toddlers have in common? Apparently—your emotional wellbeing. In this laugh-out-loud and deeply relatable collection of essays, author and accidental philosopher Debbie Danielsen digs into the messy joy of tending both garden beds and soul wounds. With dirt under her nails and humor in her heart, she explores how compost can teach you about grief, mint about boundaries, and why talking to your tomatoes isn’t all that weird (especially if they talk back). ...

First, Catch is a cookbook without recipes, an invitation to journey through the digressive mind of a chef at work, and a hymn to a singular nine-dish festive spring lunch. In Eagle’s kitchen, open shelves reveal colorful jars of vegetables pickling over months, and a soffritto of onions, celery, and carrots cook slowly under a watchful gaze in a skillet heavy enough to double as a murder weapon. He is a tour guide to the world of ingredients, a culinary explorer, and thoughtful commentator on the ways immigration, technology, and fashion has changed the way we eat.

*Winner of the 2018 Gold Medal of Achievement for Best Overall Book from GardenComm: Garden Communicators International* Carol Michel, author of the award-winning blog May Dreams Gardens, has penned a delightful book of gardening stories recounting her years speed weeding, scolding plants for their poor manners, experiencing the magic of a clover lawn, searching for elusive "rare in cultivation" plants, narrowly avoiding tussles in the garden center, formally evicting drought from her garden, and offering advice for those new to gardening. Is it possible to be utterly charming and wickedly ...

There’s life...and then...there’s holiday life...and then...there’s holiday life when you’ve got time to think about it after retirement. And for this retired guy, that means it’s all about his dogs, his childhood memories and the memories he’s created throughout the years with his family. Welcome to the first holiday essay collection by Everett Kunzelman, the second book in his series - Humorous Essays on Life After Retirement.

The hotel I checked in on my trip to Kyoto gave me a discount coupon for the buffet breakfast and I had it next morning at the restaurant. The buffet had Japanese expensive dishes in addition to the familiar Western breakfast dishes, which made up the most luxurious buffet breakfast I’d ever had. As there were many foreign guests around, it produced an international atmosphere. One of the walls of the restaurant was the glass window from the ceiling to the floor. Beyond it was a small Japanese garden that had a pond with many red-and-white-colored koi fish. When I was eating delicious ...

This story is actually a daily account of a naturalist's years of observing and writing about zoological and insect life on her estate. It takes place in the late 1890s at The Grove, Stanmore, in England, Mrs. Brightwen's very beautiful and secluded estate. Here, there were woods and shrubberies, a lake, and a large garden that offered a field for Mrs. Brightwen's zoological and insect observations. It was not, however, until her 60th year that she began to be a writer.

住まい、健康、ふるまい、人間関係……人生を心地よく整えるたった一つのものさし。何が心地よく、何が美しいことなのか。