A Garden for Life: The Natural Approach to Designing, Planting, and Maintaining a North Temperate Garden

by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

The avid gardener will need no other resource than this book to plan and maintain a natural garden on the country farm or in the suburban backyard, a habitat congenial to the scarlet tanager, the monarch butterfly, and the toad. Unique to this book is author Beresford-Kroeger's concept of bioplanning, in which the gardener views the site as a biological system and the activity of gardening as an ecological task. To assist in bioplanning a garden, the author provides both plans that are adaptable to different garden sizes and shapes, as well as planting instructions emphasizing organic care, ecofunction, and environmentally friendly means of pest control. A Garden for Life challenges everyone to create an ecologically valuable garden for the joy of doing so, and for the salvation of our natural world. Diana Beresford-Kroeger is the author of Arboretum America . She is a botanist, medical and agricultural researcher, lecturer, and self-defined "renegade scientist" in the fields of classical botany, medical biochemistry, organic chemistry, and nuclear chemistry. She lives in Ontario, Canada.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction

264 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1999

About the author

DIANA BERESFORD-KROEGER, a botanist, medical biochemist and self-defined "renegade scientist," brings together ethnobotany, horticulture, spirituality and alternative medicine to reveal a path toward better stewardship of the natural world. Diana's latest book is called The Sweetness of a Simple Life. A precise and poetic writer steeped in Gaelic storytelling traditions gathered from her childhood in Ireland, her previous books include The Global Forest, Arboretum Borealis: A Lifeline of the Planet, Arboretum America: A Philosophy of the Forest, A Garden for Life and a collection of stories, Time Will Tell. In 2010, Diana was inducted as a Wings Worldquest Fellow. The Utne Reader named her one of their Visionaries for 2011. She lives in Ontario, Canada, with her husband, surrounded by her research garden filled with rare and endangered species.

Reviews

[Lolz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Designed to serve a home situated on a typical subdivision lot “to reinstate the balance of nature that was upset during the development of the subdivision and the construction houses. This plan transforms a home into a biosphere sanctuary…”
Very thorough list of plants with their garden benefits: anti-feline/bird protection, beneficial insects, beneficial amphibians, allelochemical, fragrance, berries for winter birds, bluebird habitat, UV resistant, etc

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

heavy maintenance gardening = every plant grouping requires it own type of amended soil; informative chapter on chemical garden controls; few natives used; not all flowers are illustrated

[Elisabeth Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very important book for everyone who loves birds, insects and generally wild life, in our precious gardens. It contains so much valuable information I have not found in any other gardening book (and I have so many of them) and it is written in a lovely, easy, entertaining way, I love so much. It is also a gardening book one can use in the whole world, in US as much as in Europe.

[Julaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent and made me want to purchase the book.