Petal & Twig: Seasonal Bouquets with Blossoms, Branches, and Grasses from Your Garden

decorated boards, 115 pp., $16.95

Garden columnist Valerie Easton is an enthusiastic supporter of creating seasonal bouquets from a garden’s bounty of blossoms, branches, and grasses. She relates the great joy that can be found in the use of “what nature offers up.” Easton describes the pleasure one receives when employing the many forms—buds, seedpods, seedheads, berries, branches, twigs, and, of course, blossoms. The author reviews guidelines for collecting and preserving living materials and comments on the choice of containers, while providing tips on plant selection, color, and design. To spur the reader onward in a celebration of garden materials, there is a chronicle of photographs of seasonal arrangements and a listing of suitable plants to grow for use in bouquets.

— Marilyn K. Alaimo, garden writer and volunteer, Chicago Botanic Garden