Planting Noah’s Garden: Further Adventures in Backyard Ecology.
1997 · Boston
by Stein, Sara
Boston: A Frances Tenebaum Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Octavo, cloth & boards (hardcover), gilt letters, 448 pp. Fine in a Fine dust jacket. From dust jacket: Sara Stein’s stunning book, Noah’s Garden, introduced a generation of gardeners to the unwitting destruction of the suburban environment caused by traditional landscaping practices. The overwhelming response to that book uncovered a longing for a more envrionmentally generous landscape style and placed its author in the forefront of the new field of ecological gardening. Now, in this new book, Sara Stein travels beyond her own garden to report on the many and diverse ways in which people in all parts of the country are working to undo the damage and help restore their backyard ecosystems. Along the way, we watch her transform a new subdivision lot into the kind of natural landscape that existed before the bulldozers of suburban sprawl erased everything in their path; we are introduced to an Omaha man whose tiny city lot serves as a migration stop for monarch butterflies; we see a multitude of wonderful variations on the American lawn; and we visit the author’s own “stone terrace,” a magical landscape that attracts all manner of fauna, including hummingbirds, butterflies, flocks of bluebirds -- and people. If the first half of Planting Noah’s Garden is an inspiration, the second half is practical. Here readers will find very specific descriptions of the ways in which they can take the necessary steps to tranform their own gardens into rich and lively landscapes. (Inventory #: 61197bd)