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Gardening in a Changing World: Plants, People and the Climate Crisis
Our planet, the Earth, is under threat, with potentially catastrophic consequences for ourselves and the other lifeforms it sustains.
Yet Nature itself can still rescue us - with plants playing a pivotal role, in the countryside - and everywhere. In gardens and parks, plants are the mainstay of our relationship with the natural world, and we celebrate them for the pleasures they bring. However, that can be part of the problem: too often we value plants for their aesthetic qualities rather than the vital role they play in the ecology of the Earth.
In this challenging and important book, Darryl Moore explores how gardens can be better for human beings and for all the other lifeforms that inhabit them. Recent developments in horticulture and plant science show us that we need to rethink our attitude to plants beyond purely aesthetic concerns, and to adopt more holistic approaches to how we design, inhabit and enjoy our gardens.
He looks at the history of garden design, to show how we got to where we are today, and recommends ways of changing to new principles of sustainable ecological horticulture.
Yet Nature itself can still rescue us - with plants playing a pivotal role, in the countryside - and everywhere. In gardens and parks, plants are the mainstay of our relationship with the natural world, and we celebrate them for the pleasures they bring. However, that can be part of the problem: too often we value plants for their aesthetic qualities rather than the vital role they play in the ecology of the Earth.
In this challenging and important book, Darryl Moore explores how gardens can be better for human beings and for all the other lifeforms that inhabit them. Recent developments in horticulture and plant science show us that we need to rethink our attitude to plants beyond purely aesthetic concerns, and to adopt more holistic approaches to how we design, inhabit and enjoy our gardens.
He looks at the history of garden design, to show how we got to where we are today, and recommends ways of changing to new principles of sustainable ecological horticulture.
- GenresGardening
256 pages, Hardcover
Published February 1, 2023
6 people are currently reading
86 people want to read
About the author
Darryl Moore
1 book1 followerDarryl is a well respected landscape design writer. His book Gardening in a Changing World, exploring the relationships between plants, people and the climate crisis, was published by Pimpernel Press in October 2022. He is a regular feature writer for Garden Design Journal and has been published in The Guardian, Homes & Gardens, The English Garden, Pro Landscaper, The Garden and RSA Journal. He is a member of the Garden Media Guild and former member of GDJ Editorial Panel.
Darryl is an award winning landscape designer, project manager, community facilitator, and Director and Co-founder of Cityscapes, a tutor at KLC School of Design, and co-curates thehub.earth, an online landscape, ecology and horticulture community resources.
His knowledge and experience of ecological approaches to planting, places him at the forefront of new developments in plant science, adaptive and resilient planting strategies, and designing urban ecological mosaics.
Darryl is an award winning landscape designer, project manager, community facilitator, and Director and Co-founder of Cityscapes, a tutor at KLC School of Design, and co-curates thehub.earth, an online landscape, ecology and horticulture community resources.
His knowledge and experience of ecological approaches to planting, places him at the forefront of new developments in plant science, adaptive and resilient planting strategies, and designing urban ecological mosaics.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 15, 2022
It's hard to describe this book, it's certainly not what I was expecting when I sat down to read it. This book won't tell you how to garden in a changing world, if you were expecting lists of plants that cope with a more unpredictable climate. It is far more than that and quite technical in places. Thoroughly researched it would have been the perfect text to have to hand as additional reading when I studied the RHS exams. This is a book to make you think, what does it mean to create a garden and why do we garden? It questions our traditional understanding of plants, their place in the world and our relationship with them. It discusses the latest research into how plants interact with their environment, each other and humans. It looks at how the approach to using plants on gardens has changed through history bringing us right up-to-date with The Dutch Wave & The Sheffield School and it looks forward to how we might have a more plant-centric future.
January 15, 2023
An excellent history of naturalistic gardening, consisting of pleasantly brief and clear chapters, plus a peek into the future. Very informative and full of references for further reading.
Two things bothered me. Quoting (and translating) the titles of foreign-language publications is not the author’s strong suit. More frequent, and therefore more disruptive and distracting, are the countless typos (a potentially famous one being ‘Aoterea’ instead of ‘Aotearoa’; other examples are a reference to a book published in ‘2102’, and the cringeworthy ‘Anthopcene’). I recommended that this, together with the correction of some odd turns-of-phrase (‘a confusion that has plagued much criticism of the subject’), be remedied in the second edition, which I wholeheartedly hope will appear, as this is a valuable book.
Two things bothered me. Quoting (and translating) the titles of foreign-language publications is not the author’s strong suit. More frequent, and therefore more disruptive and distracting, are the countless typos (a potentially famous one being ‘Aoterea’ instead of ‘Aotearoa’; other examples are a reference to a book published in ‘2102’, and the cringeworthy ‘Anthopcene’). I recommended that this, together with the correction of some odd turns-of-phrase (‘a confusion that has plagued much criticism of the subject’), be remedied in the second edition, which I wholeheartedly hope will appear, as this is a valuable book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews