The Green Gardening Handbook: Grow, Eat and Enjoy

The 2014 Great British Bake Off winner Birtwhistle (Green Living Made Easy) humbly tells readers that her only claim to gardening expertise is more than 40 years spent tending to her own organic garden in Great Britain. She takes readers through a year of gardening by season, beginning with early spring. She focuses on the plants—mostly vegetables, herbs, and berries—that she’s planted. There are no photos and only a few line drawings; what readers get instead is a slightly meandering but consistently charming and informative narrative about what to do in the garden at various times of the year, from prep to planting to weeding to composting and more. The instructions are best for experienced gardeners, not beginners. But the reading experience is much like sitting across from the author and chatting about gardening over tea and scones. The author refers to her husband as “Him Indoors,” uses colorful phrases such as boots being “blathered in mud,” and calls vegetables by their British names: courgette for zucchini, aubergine for eggplant, and more.