My love of gardening began with reading. Having collected every book I found on the subject over the years, I finally made the leap and began planting. It was daunting, but it’s become one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done.
Spring brings a sense of hope and abundance for gardening enthusiasts. Part of the season’s renewal comes from a new crop of gardening books, and this year three stand out.
I wish I’d had Martha Stewart’s Gardening Handbook when I first started digging. As dense as it is motivating, her book is packed with useful tips. From planting in containers to sowing wildflower seeds, it serves as a reference guide for new green thumbs on the hunt for information.
“Go to nurseries and find something you love,” she advises. “You’re bound to make mistakes—I make lots—but you’ll learn from them, and you can always dig up a plant and try again.”
Cordelia de Castellane’s Flower Couture: From My Garden to My House is dreamy. In a miraculously short few years, de Castellane, the creative director at Dior Maison, transformed the garden of her country house—an hour’s drive from Paris—into a work “laboratory.” After her father’s death, in 2019, she turned to gardening to help heal her grief. “[It] saved me from a lot of sadness that maybe I wouldn’t [otherwise] have overcome,” she says. “The garden brings life. It gives hope.” Today, some of her crops are for sale at her Coffee Flower Shop, in the Seventh Arrondissement.
De Castellane’s garden was partly inspired by Christian Dior, whose passion for flowers was woven into his designs. One of his most renowned couture dresses, from his spring-summer 1951 collection, is included among the outstanding photographs in Phaidon’s The Rose Book. While the rose is beloved in the Western world, this volume uncovers a niche that has yet to be explored. Largely visual, it juxtaposes images of the flower throughout time. A controversial bloom, the rose demands diligent upkeep and can quickly be washed away by a summer storm. Still, as the renowned Spanish landscape designer Fernando Caruncho says, “My respect for roses and flowers is the same as that for my dreams, because roses represent dreams.”
Whether you’re an expert gardener or a nervous newcomer, consider the wise words Stewart shared in the 2024 documentary Martha: “If you want to be happy for a year, get a husband. If you want to be happy for a decade, get a dog. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, make a garden.”
Catie Marron is a New York–based writer and the author of Becoming a Gardener: What Reading and Digging Taught Me About Living
