Home Grown Gardening. Best Roses, Herbs, and Edible Flowers: Easy Plants for More Beautiful Gardens. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999.
Reason read: what can I say? I have fallen into a rabbit hole of discovery. From the moment I first read Finding Freedom by Erin French I have been on a culinary journey. I specifically borrowed Best Roses so I could do a little research on edible flowers.
The first chapter of Best Roses pays special attention to growing roses from the first day you put them in the ground to keeping them going for generations to come. That would make a lot of sense considering the title of the book starts with “best roses.”
In truth, I didn’t find Best Roses all that helpful. Maybe it’s because the focus is more on roses than anything else. Out of the 263 pages, the first 116 are all about identifying specific roses. There is one recipe for rose hip jam and how to transplant a rose before moving on to soil Ph, soil nutrients, propagation, and creating an aromatic garden. It isn’t until page 129 when you dig into herbs and edible flowers. The book ends with a primer on how to harvest and preserve herbs, a glossary, a hardiness zone map, credits for the gorgeous photograph, and an index.
As an aside, I was reminded of an episode of “Judging Amy” when Amy took over her mother’s house and dug up the “old” roses in the yard. Little did she know, the bush had been an irreplaceable family heirloom which had been passed down for generations. Why Amy’s mother never told her the story of the roses especially since they were so important is beyond me.
Author fact: Home Grown Gardening took most of the information from Taylor’s 50 Best Roses and Taylor’s 50 Best Herbs and Edible Flowers.
Book trivia: Roses is chock full of gorgeous photographs but short on in-depth information. I said that already.
~*LunaSea*~ 