Inside Out

The Art and Craft of Home Landscaping
By Jeff Hutton

Are you a gardener or a landscaper? According to Jeff Hutton, a landscape designer in Vernon, Connecticut, there’s a distinction.

After all, would you furnish your home by popping into a furniture store on a whim, buying whatever catches your eye and then shoving your I-don’t-care-if-it-is-too big -and-clashes-I-want-it-anyway sofas and chairs just anywhere and expect your home to look attractive and inviting? Well, if your whole house is furnished straight from Ethan Allen, yeah, you might. Most people, however, decorate their home with at least some thought to the basics of concepts like color, space, patterns, flow, scale — even if it’s only subconsciously.

These same basic design principles could and should apply to the landscape outside of your home as well, according to Hutton, who shares his more than thirty years of experience designing outdoor living spaces in his new book, Inside Out. Hutton advocates “. . . merging the surrounding landscape with the structure of the house.” Calling himself, “a great proponent of what I call ‘inside out’ – effectively blurring the border between architecture and landscape architecture, or interior and exterior design,” he contends: “Your yard is the canvas. Design is about composition, no matter what the application.”

Since too much of my garden canvas is now blank, courtesy of the ongoing drought here in Georgia, this book offers a much-needed landscape cache of information and ideas. Foundation beds, walkways and paths, decks and porches, patios and courtyards, retaining walls, ornamental grasses, ornamental and shade trees, foliage and flowers, as well as easy-to-follow discussions of integration, intersection, association, balance, composition, and color are all here in the wonderful book.

Hutton is also a self-proclaimed lifelong student of plant nomenclature and he includes a fascinating chapter on deciphering the Linnaeus Code, the methodology of classifying and naming living organisms organized by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, often called the Father of Taxonomy. According to Hutton, “It’s pretty satisfying to be able to read the label on a plant, and understand its character from its name.”

Do you think this is useless information? Not so. If you’re browsing the garden center for something to plant in that small wedge of ground next to your house, you’ll know enough to give the plant with giganteum on its label a pass.

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The $64 Tomato

The $64 Tomato, How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity,

Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis

in the Quest for the Perfect Garden

By William Alexander

I don’t know about you, but I have never considered adding up how much I spend on my garden during the year and then, somehow, calculating how much each plant has actually cost. I’m feeling stressed just thinking about it.

However, a New England gardener named William Alexander did just that for his three acre backyard vegetable garden and small orchard in a small town in the Hudson Valley. The result is his hilarious book: The $64 Tomato.

Alexander relates his quest for organic gardening, IPM (integrated pest management) and agonizes over the philosophical horticultural conundrum: what actually constitutes “organic”? He takes us along as he starts down the slippery slope of chemicals in the garden, providing us with lots of laughs, as well as a lot of interesting facts. (Although I learned more than I really needed to know about apple trees and baggies.)

When his family has the inevitable plumbing problems related to their septic tank, we meet Lou, the local excavator, who doesn’t quite finish up the job he started back in the November. Not only do the Alexanders not hear from him, but Lou leaves his backhoe behind, stuck in their yard.

For Alexander, gardening is also a bit of a blood sport. He tries to go after deer, squirrels, an opossum and a groundhog he calls Superchuck. I’m not a hunting/trapping fan, so I was rooting for his Havahartattack trap. Thankfully, Alexander is rather inept at animal control.

William Alexander deftly and hilariously relates his gardening/small-scale farming experience (When does a vegetable garden become a farm? Is yet another thought worth exploring.) When it’s too hot or too cold to be out in your garden, do yourself a favor and curl up with this excellent book. You won’t be disappointed.

P.S. Next year I’m going to grow heirloom Brandywine tomatoes.

“Gardening is, by its very nature, an expression of the triumph of optimism over experience. No matter how bad this year was, there’s always next year. Experience doesn’t count. Just because the carrots have been knobby, misshapen, and somewhat bitter four years in a row doesn’t mean they’re going to be knobby and misshapen next year.” --- William Alexander