From Grass To Garden: How To Reap Bounty From A Small Yard

by Janet Lembke, Joe Nutt (Illustrator)

Janet Lembke loves to garden. But when she moved into her urban home in Virginia, she only had one-eighth of an acre to work a small front yard and a small backyard. How she traded a postage-stamp lawn for an edible cornucopia is what this enchanting book is all about.

Lembke joyfully guides us on her gardening journey, in chapters

"Tomato Haven"
"The Grass Extermination Project"
"Tools of the Trade"
"How a Garden Grows"
"Herbs"
"Flowers"
"Vegetables"
"Outwitting the Gardener"
"Wooing the Green Man, Courting Dame Kind"
and "Garden Dreams"

From Grass to Garden is chock-full of tips and advice for gardeners with tiny plots, including what plants are compatible with others; garden paths and seating; what vegetables and plants work best in front versus backyards; and more. She offers everything a hopeful gardener needs to reap bounty for the kitchen table from what was once a small, pesky lawn.

Genres: Gardening

221 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Janet Lembke (2 March 1933 - 3 September 2013), née Janet Nutt, was an American author, essayist, naturalist, translator and scholar. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio during the Great Depression, graduated in 1953 from Middlebury College, Vermont, with a degree in Classics, and her knowledge of the classical Greek and Latin worldview, from Homer to Virgil, informed her life and work. A Certified Virginia Master Gardener, she lived in Virginia and North Carolina, drawing inspiration from both locales. She was recognized for her creative view of natural cycles, agriculture and of animals, both domestic and wild, with whom we share the natural environment. Referred to as an "acclaimed Southern naturalist," she was equally (as The Chicago Tribune described her) a "classicist, a noted Oxford University Press translator of the works of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus". She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate Virgil's Georgics, having already translated Euripides’ Electra and Hecuba, and Aeschylus’s Persians and Suppliants.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though this gardening book has no pictures, I learned a lot from it and found it to be quite charming.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has some lovely moments, but they tend to get lost in a sea of verbosity. One wonderful thing about this book is the author's comments on plants' Latin names--I learned a lot about nomenclature from these off-the-cuff musings. Worth keeping as a reference for her thoughts on individual plant species.