dear santa: books!

Okay, Santa, in case you’re read­ing this: You know that I love books. And with the pub­lish­ing indus­try being so bat­tered by new media like, gulp, blog­ging (mea culpa), what bet­ter way to sup­port the art form of cool, inter­est­ing books?

Gar­den pic­ture books are always appre­ci­ated, as are books that are a lit­tle more thought­ful about gar­den­ing and nature and cul­ture. New books from the local book­store are great, but used ones from a local book­store or a site like abebooks.com work just as well. In fact, that’s where you can find some great out of print books you’ll never encounter any­where else. And what bet­ter way to par­tic­i­pate in recycling?

Here are some titles that would make me extra-happy, and I’d guess that many like-minded gar­den­ers out there would find them inter­est­ing as well. Some are from the past year, some from fur­ther back.

  • Niwaki: Prun­ing, Train­ing and Shap­ing Japan­ese Gar­den Trees by Jake Hob­son
    Books with func­tional instruc­tions for how to prune are use­ful, but this book gives you ideas on how to move from the func­tional to the sen­si­tive, grace­ful and artis­tic. This is prun­ing with nature instead of against it. I don’t have a Japan­ese gar­den, but I can always learn lessons from its traditions.

Although I love the works of the Dutch gar­den designer Piet Oudolf, one of the gods of the “new peren­ni­als” gar­den­ing move­ment, I real­ized that I didn’t have any of his books. The titles that look the most interesting:

And some selec­tions that are more from the art side of things:

  • Los Ange­les Trees : Paint­ings, Draw­ings, Film­stills by Lucas Reiner
    I haven’t had a chance to flip through this book, but the recent LA Times writeup looked entic­ing. “The trees exude patience and humor, cast­ing sneaky, leafy shad­ows across the graf­fiti and cacoph­o­nous sig­nage of L.A… [Reiner] began to draw and paint indi­vid­ual trees, most of them not Cal­i­for­nia natives. He saw their strange shapes as ‘the result of their inter­ac­tion with the needs of civilization.’”

If price is no object, there’s always the clas­sic (and now ridicu­lously pricey):

  • A Few Palm Trees by Ed Ruscha
    The title pretty much says it. Ruscha’s book has black and white pho­tos of var­i­ous palm trees in the Hol­ly­wood area, along with the street addresses where he found them. The pho­tos aren’t par­tic­u­larly “good” in any tra­di­tional artis­tic sense. It’s just a stu­pid lit­tle artist’s book with pic­tures of a few palm trees–pretty much the antithe­sis of the pre­ced­ing effort, just a cool lit­tle slacker of a book. It’s weirdly compelling.

And keep­ing with the one-plant theme:

  • Saguaros pho­tographs by Mark Klett, text by Gre­gory McNamee
    Mark Klett is one of my favorite pho­tog­ra­phers work­ing today. Few peo­ple cap­ture the edges of civ­i­liza­tion and nature bet­ter than he. In this book Klett col­lects together images of saguaros he’s take over the years. No two plants of any species are exactly the same, and with saguaros it’s even more true. These are plants with char­ac­ter, pho­tographed with soul.

And then I might add some gen­eral items, not strictly book– or gardening-related, but prod­ucts that are made of things from the earth:

  • Arti­sanal cheeses, any­thing from stinky to refined!
  • Craft beers, ales espe­cially, the hop­pier the better

And you thought I was hard to shop for!

December 09 2008 03:02 pm | Categories: art • gardening • photography | Tags: •

One Response to “dear santa: books!”

  1. Philip on 12 Dec 2008 at 1:48 pm #

    That sounds like a great list!

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