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Fruit & Nuts: A Comprehensive Guide to the Cultivation, Uses And Health Benefits of over 300 Food-producing Plants
An informative and comprehensive guide to growing and using more than 200 species of fruits and nuts, this A–Z reference will inspire gardeners to grow and use a wider variety of edible plants. Each entry includes a brief history, detailed description, and authoritative information on propagation, as well as helpful advice about harvesting times and methods, cultivation and location needs, pruning, pests and diseases, nutrition and health benefits, and medicinal uses. An extensive, annotated list of cultivars will help gardeners and growers select the most appropriate plants for their location and needs. Suitable for home gardeners, horticulture professionals, orchardists, and nutritionists.
480 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 23, 2024
'Fruit & Nuts' is a great resource, but not without its faults. The range of plants is encyclopaedic, particularly those from temperate & subtropical areas. It's not so comprehensive on tropical plants. There are some glaring omissions: date palm, coconut palm & breadfruit, all staple foods; also Brazil nut, durian, mangosteen, rambutan, & makrut lime, all of which are grown commercially. Some of the classifications appear to be arbitrary: tea & sugarcane, not technically fruit, appear in this book, whilst vanilla & cacao are in her other volume 'Vegetables, Herbs & Spices'.
Whilst I haven't read 'Fruit & Nuts' from cover to cover, I've dipped into it frequently. There's an error under Araucaria bidwillii (bunya bunya). Ms Lyle states that it's not as hardy as A. heterophylla (Norfolk Island pine). Not so: A bidwillii is hardy to at least -7 deg C for short periods. I doubt that A. heterophylla tolerates much below 0 deg C. The other shortcoming is the list of cultivars within each entry. For those species with only a few cvs, they're well-described, but for plants with many the number is limited, the description brief & the selection arbitrary.
Having said that, the range of temperate plants is breathtaking. There are some I'd never heard of. Each entry is at least one page long, some as many as four. They include a good quality photo, background, description, cultivation, yield/harvest, use as food, other uses & nutritional/medicinal value. The early chapters of the book briefly cover topics such as pollination, types of fruit, cultivation, pruning & training, pests & diseases & health benefits. There is a useful appendix of plants for different conditions & uses.
Susanna Lyle is British born, widely travelled & now lives in New Zealand There's a slight New Zealand bias to the text. Curiously, the only fruit native to New Zealand that I found was Fuchsia excorticata.
Whilst I haven't read 'Fruit & Nuts' from cover to cover, I've dipped into it frequently. There's an error under Araucaria bidwillii (bunya bunya). Ms Lyle states that it's not as hardy as A. heterophylla (Norfolk Island pine). Not so: A bidwillii is hardy to at least -7 deg C for short periods. I doubt that A. heterophylla tolerates much below 0 deg C. The other shortcoming is the list of cultivars within each entry. For those species with only a few cvs, they're well-described, but for plants with many the number is limited, the description brief & the selection arbitrary.
Having said that, the range of temperate plants is breathtaking. There are some I'd never heard of. Each entry is at least one page long, some as many as four. They include a good quality photo, background, description, cultivation, yield/harvest, use as food, other uses & nutritional/medicinal value. The early chapters of the book briefly cover topics such as pollination, types of fruit, cultivation, pruning & training, pests & diseases & health benefits. There is a useful appendix of plants for different conditions & uses.
Susanna Lyle is British born, widely travelled & now lives in New Zealand There's a slight New Zealand bias to the text. Curiously, the only fruit native to New Zealand that I found was Fuchsia excorticata.
February 16, 2013
I found this book, and Susanna Lyle's vegetables one to be very informative. The horticultural basics in the beginning pages were generic, but I enjoyed the short elaborations on the importance and functions of different vitamins and nutrients.
I ended up finding myself going back through the book multiple times to refer to the nutritional values listed in the book and even took notes. While they were good, I found much of the wording redundant, while some of the words were vague at best to describe some of the nutrient contents. In places words like "some" were used to describe the nutrient content of an entry, yet "good" was used in other places for an entry that actually had less than the entry with "some" and this was fairly common. But this was only a minor annoyance, if it had more accurate details for each entry's nutritional values I would have rated it a 5 star. To the books credit, it did contain many nutrients listed in either International Units (IU), percentage of the RDA, or the number of milligrams per 100g.
This book also has interesting comments on how native cultures use the plants as food or otherwise. It also includes information about varieties of plants, their cultivation, propagation, and care.
I greatly enjoyed this book, despite the slight annoyance with the nutritional section, and would recommend it to anyone as an indispensable resource both for nutritional and horticultural information.
Worth 4.5 stars to me.
I ended up finding myself going back through the book multiple times to refer to the nutritional values listed in the book and even took notes. While they were good, I found much of the wording redundant, while some of the words were vague at best to describe some of the nutrient contents. In places words like "some" were used to describe the nutrient content of an entry, yet "good" was used in other places for an entry that actually had less than the entry with "some" and this was fairly common. But this was only a minor annoyance, if it had more accurate details for each entry's nutritional values I would have rated it a 5 star. To the books credit, it did contain many nutrients listed in either International Units (IU), percentage of the RDA, or the number of milligrams per 100g.
This book also has interesting comments on how native cultures use the plants as food or otherwise. It also includes information about varieties of plants, their cultivation, propagation, and care.
I greatly enjoyed this book, despite the slight annoyance with the nutritional section, and would recommend it to anyone as an indispensable resource both for nutritional and horticultural information.
Worth 4.5 stars to me.
January 6, 2013
Kind of silly, more of a reference book really. But lots of great info.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews