★Bennett, Leslie & Julie Chai. Garden Wonderland: Create Life-Changing Outdoor Spaces for Beauty, Harvest, Meaning, and Joy. Ten Speed. Apr. 2024. 272p. ISBN 9781984861382. $29.99. GARDENING

Bennett is the founder of Black Sanctuary Gardens, coauthor of The Beautiful Edible Garden, and winner of the American Horticultural Society’s Landscape Design Award. Chai is the editor of three of the Floret books, including the award-winning Floret Farm’s Cut Flower Garden. They partner here to offer a significant guide to garden design. Their book stresses something many gardeners likely feel but will appreciate having articulated: that gardens are wonderlands, places where garden makers can experience awe and find a sense of fullness, identity, and belonging. The book asks readers to think deeply about their garden spaces and stresses inspiration, practicality, and design. Featuring garden examples owned by an inclusive range of people, chapters highlight different choices gardeners might make, such as edible, floral, healing, gathering, or cultural garden spaces, with tips and examples to help realize each. VERDICT What makes this book consequential is its sensibility and purpose. There are a number of outstanding books on building gardens, but the intentionality of this stands out. It is a title librarians should consider a part of a core collection.—Neal Wyatt

Lewin, Angie & Christopher Stocks. The Book of Wild Flowers: Reflections on Favorite Plants. Thames & Hudson. May 2024. 136p. ISBN 9780500027066. $24.95. GARDENING

Artist Lewin (Angie Lewin: Plants and Places) and writer Stocks (Forgotten Fruits) collaborate to create a charming book that shares Lewin’s favorite plants that grow wild in Great Britain. The 21 entries aren’t all native to Great Britain, and readers might not agree that all of them are wildflowers. But it’s a wide-ranging list: dandelion, yellow rattle, kidney vetch, devil’s-bit scabious, alexanders, thrift, white and red clover, snake’s head fritillary, wild carrot, corn poppy, plantain, ramson, primrose, campion, ivy, snowdrop, marsh cinquefoil, cow parsley, goat’s beard, yarrow, and teasel. Lewin’s lovely, stylized illustrations of the plants, in muted colors, include watercolors, linocuts, wood engravings, and screenprints. She doesn’t, however, reflect on what each plant evokes or means to her. Stocks’s beautifully descriptive vignettes of the plants include their common and scientific names (and their meanings), along with a detailed botanical description, preferred habitat, distribution, and facts and folklore about the plant. He also writes about the wildlife and insects associated with the plants and their related species. VERDICT This cheerful, whimsical, eminently browsable book will appeal to nature lovers, gardeners, artists, and readers who enjoy botanical art meshed with engaging narration.—Sue O’Brien

★Poulson, Gracielinda. Grace Rose Farm Garden Roses: The Complete Guide to Growing & Arranging Spectacular Blooms. Artisan. Mar. 2024. 304p. ISBN 9781648290831. $30. GARDENING

Readers curious about growing roses or just wanting to look at beautiful pictures alongside poetic descriptions of stunning flowers will be delighted by this book. Poulson, founder of Southern California’s Grace Rose Farm, offers readers a title that’s richly filled with helpful information on hundreds of rose types. The book sorts them by color, and lovely photographs accompany each featured flower. There’s also a key that details everything from hardiness zones to disease-resistance to whether the plant is suitable for container planting. Seasoned rose growers will enjoy the descriptions of each bloom and the helpful hints for care. Readers new to nurturing this flower will learn much, and Poulson’s encouraging tone diminishes the intimidation factor of rose cultivation. The book provides up-to-date information about soil amendments, options for pest control, and preferred methods of garden preparation. The author is also humble in noting mistakes she’s made; she hopes mentioning them will help fellow gardeners avoid making the same errors. VERDICT A tremendous, captivating resource for rose gardeners. This eye-catching book will look great on seasonal displays about gardening.—Elizabeth Majka 

Williams, Bunny (text) & Annie Schlechter (photos). Life in the Garden. Rizzoli. Mar. 2024. 408p. ISBN 9780847899692. $60. GARDENING

Williams (Love Affairs with Houses), an award-winning interior designer, offers a lavish garden coffee-table book that’s mixed with memoir. It is as close to a personal tour of her many-spaced 18th-century Connecticut home and garden as readers can get without booking a ticket to one of her tours. As might be expected of Williams project, the design of the book is notable. For a start, it is big: 408 pages and measuring 12.4 by 10.4 inches. It is crafted to showcase Schlechter’s 400 photographs, which create an immersive effect: sweeping green clipped hedges, hydrangeas, gray-cream gravel, garden ornament, the velvet-deep of an iris in close-up, a once intricate fence consumed by wayward shrubbery, a fern unfolding in a spiral. As the book walks readers through the garden’s lush yet ordered spaces, Williams lists the plants she grows, including notes on varieties. Other pockets of text offer memories of her Christmas celebrations, lessons on flower arranging, and a history of how she built her garden. A brief resources page rounds out the work. VERDICT Readers seeking inspiration will find it here, in color palettes, shapes, concepts of order and more naturalized spaces, and curated beauty.—Neal Wyatt