This is my first gardening book club entry. When I stumbled across the Garden book club I immediately wanted to join. I just liked the idea of it. Read a book, about one of your favourite topics, at your leisure, and when and if you're ready write up your experiences and post them, then send a link to the book club. So easy. As it is the North American spring the book club decided to allow two months (April & May) to read the book, Passalong plants. 
Despite this, I am running late in writing up my impressions.... best laid plans....
When I decided to participate, I ordered the current month's book and the previous two: Two Gardeners and Teaming with microbes.
I wanted to get a feel for what the club read and through reading some of the reviews, I felt that the previous books sounded like I would enjoy them. Well, at least Two gardeners sounded enjoyable and Teaming with microbes sounded worthy. My parcel arrived and I immediately enjoyed Two gardeners and Teaming with Microbes. These were my kind of gardening books.
Passalong plants though, well, I liked the cover (always a good start) but in judging it by it's cover I decided it wasn't my kind of gardening. At least not in my present incarnation. Certainly in the past I've built and tended flower gardens, (in my previous home) but currently I do the bare minimum in my home garden and put all of my love and energy and attention (and therefore subsequent readings and knowledge) into my vegetable garden. As I leafed through the book enjoying the photos and layout and titles of the plant essays "Wherefore art thou Deutzia" "Easy, Touch, Confusing", "Come up and see me some rainy day", "Ditch that thrift",and "Power to the purple", I thought it had some promise. Then leafing through the final chapter of the book "Well, I think it's pretty, an exploration of passalong gardeners' fascination with fine yard art, including pink flamingos, goose windmills, plastic flowers, and milk of magnesia trees", I was certain that authors Steve Bender and Felder Rushing were my kind of people. Folks who felt gardening could be about plants, people, humour and not taking oneself too seriously. And then I put the book down for two months. As the book report deadline loomed, I picked it up again and read it and this time really enjoyed it. The essays and folksy tone of the book are enormously cheerful. Given it's layout and intent, it isn't necessary to read the book from cover to cover, though if you did, it would only increase your enjoyment. If, like me, you just want to get to know it well enough to understand it, then reading a handful of plant essays in each chapter will still be very satisfying. It has 8 chapters and they are largely organised around themes like perfume ("Smells for the sidetrack"), outrageous blooms ("Gaudy or Tacky?"), rampant growers ("The plants that get away") and plants you may not exactly want but get nonetheless ("Aunt Bea's pickles").
As an Australian gardener who largely built a native garden last time I grew a flower garden, I did not recognize many of the plants. Though having said that, I was constantly surprised by finding yet another plant essay that had some familiarity to me, particularly if I had seen it in someone else's garden. When my time comes to grow a flower garden again, or to put energy and enthusiasm into landscaping my home, I will consider this book and consider which of these plants, largely described from a Southern USA perspective could possibly grow here in our increasingly arid environment. Even if the book is never "useful" in gardening for my purpose, I feel glad I've read it and glad that I belong to a wider, global community of gardeners. It most particularly left me with the impression that I wanted to visit the southern gardens of the United States. I wanted to see the lush, green, floral, folksy, rampant, gaudy, thorny, tricky plants in all their natural glory.
Blogged with Flock
