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The latest crop of winter books gives gardeners plenty to ponder while awaiting spring. A Wilder Life In this season-by-season guide to getting in touch with nature, Celestine Maddy, editor of the popular Wilder Quarterly, offers DIY instructions on everything from fermenting kimchi to cultivating a night-blooming garden. ($30, Artisan) The Herbal Apothecary: 100 Medicinal Herbs and How to Use Them Written by naturopathic physician JJ Pursell, The Herbal Apothecary takes both modern science and traditional healing methods into account, providing techniques for making teas, tinctures, salves, and syrups aimed at alleviating colds, headaches, and other ailments. ($25, Timber Press) The Flower Workshop Ariella Chezar, an instructor at Manhattan’s famed FlowerSchool New York, demystifies the art of arranging with 50 easy-to-follow projects, including a wreath of citrus and bay leaf and centerpieces of foraged foliage, berries, and flowering vines. ($25, Ten Speed Press) The Culinary Herbal: Growing & Preserving 97 Flavorful Herbs Targeted at gardeners who like to cook, writer Susan Belsinger and botanist Arthur O. Tucker’s book delivers solid advice on cultivating common and not-so-common herbs (like rau ra˘m, a Vietnamese coriander), as well as recipes for herbal syrups, vinegars, butters, and more. ($28, Timber Press) The Rooftop Growing Guide Annie Novak, the co-founder of Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn, tackles the issues particular to gardening way above ground—structural stability, soil composition, irrigation—and details which plants work best and why. ($23, Ten Speed Press) Gardening with Less Water Scientist David A. Bainbridge, who has worked on desert restoration and irrigation projects in arid locales for 40 years, outlines inexpensive, low-tech strategies for cutting water consumption in backyard gardens by up to 90 percent. ($15, Storey) Modern Farmer is a quarterly magazine devoted to the people, policy, issues, animals, plants, and technology of farming and food.
