The New City Gardener: Natural Techniques and Necessary Skills for a Successful Urban Garden

Beryl Hamilton is a freelance writer in Thunder Bay who specializes in
home gardening.

Urban gardens present special challenges. City conditions sometimes
offer inhospitable environments for plants, and city life sometimes
limits the time one has to indulge in gardening. Meeting such challenges
in productive ways is the subject of this book, which contains
illustrated chapters on garden styles; ecology; perennials, beds, and
borders; trees, shrubs, and vines; lawns and ground covers; and
essential maintenance.

The book emphasizes the importance of discovering both the limitations
and potential of your urban garden environment. As Adam explains, “I
hope this book will help you to recognize the character of soil and
moisture in your own growing space, and the methods of giving plants
what they need to grow in those conditions.” Her ingenious and
inspiring solutions to urban gardening challenges, gloriously recorded
in the illustrations, invariably expand one’s assumptions about what
is in fact possible. As a sourcebook for ideas, The New City Gardener is
a superb resource. On a more mundane level, the advice given for
essential maintenance (particularly that related to urban lawns) is
satisfyingly comprehensive.

The book’s major weakness is its confusing layout. The text has a
jarring tendency to run away from the illustrations it is meant to
explain, so that one must do a good deal of page-flipping and navigation
around the many highlighted digressions in order to follow a particular
concept. Furthermore, the division of the material does not always make
for efficient discovery of important details, and if one does not know
where to look or what it is precisely that one is looking for, the
process of searching can become frustrating.

Caveats aside, Adam’s book provides the curious gardener with all the
information necessary to plant successfully in an urban environment.