French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France
10 best books like French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France (Richard Goodman): Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm, We've Always Had Paris...and Provence: A Scrapbook of Our Life in France, My Garden (Book), Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas, Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, The Writer in the Garden, Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older, Old Herbaceous: A Novel of the Garden, Letters From Eden: A Year at Home, in the Woods, Mrs. Whaley and Her Charleston Garden
Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm
| Author | David Mas Masumoto |
| ISBN | 0062510258 |
A lovely, meditative little book about the challenges and joys of farming. Masumoto is a third-generation Japanese-American peach and grape farmer in California. The direct impetus for writing this book was the threat of losing his Sun Crest peaches; although the fruit was absolutely delicious,...
| Author | Patricia Wells |
| ISBN | 0060898615 |
Patricia Wells, long recognized as the leading American authority on French food, and her husband, Walter, live the life in France that many of us have often fantasized about. After more than a quarter century, they are as close to being accepted as "French" as any non-natives can be. In this delightful...
| Author | Jamaica Kincaid |
| ISBN | 0374527768 |
One of our finest writers on one of her greatest loves.Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a plot in the middle of her front lawn. There, to the consternation of more experienced friends, she planted only seeds of the flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book): she gathers all she loves about...
| Author | John Baxter |
| ISBN | 0061562335 |
A witty cultural and culinary education, Immoveable Feast is the charming, funny, and improbable tale of how a man who was raised on white bread—and didn't speak a word of French—unexpectedly ended up with the sacred duty of preparing the annual Christmas dinner for a venerable Parisian family.
Ernest...
A classic in the literature of the garden, Green Thoughts is a beautifully written and highly original collection of seventy-two essays, alphabetically arranged, on topics ranging from “Annuals” and “Artichokes” to “Weeds” and “Wildflowers.” An amateur gardener for over thirty...
| Author | Jane Garmey |
| ISBN | 1565121813 |
Not the least of the charms of this collection is that it is printed on quality paper, with delightful line drawings, and is just the right size to encourage the reader to take it in hand and turn the pages--which they will surely want to do once they have dipped into any chapter, where they will find some...
Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older
| Author | Sydney Eddison |
| ISBN | 1604692669 |
From the winner of the National Garden Club's Award of Excellence
Although the garden may beckon as strongly as ever, the tasks involved—pulling weeds, pushing wheelbarrows, digging holes, moving heavy pots—become increasingly difficult, or even impossible, with advancing age....
| Author | Reginald Arkell |
| ISBN | 0812967380 |
Back in print after fifty years
Old Herbaceous is a classic British novel of the garden, with a title character as outsized and unforgettable as P. G. Wodehouse’s immortal butler, Jeeves. Born at the dusk of the Victorian era, Bert Pinnegar, an awkward orphan child with one leg a tad longer...
Letters From Eden: A Year at Home, in the Woods
| Author | Julie Zickefoose |
| ISBN | 0618573089 |
At the age of seven, Julie Zickefoose knew that she wanted to paint birds for a living, and her lifelong dedication shows in her paintings, which are meticulously accurate as well as beautiful. The paintings used here, of scenes from her beloved home in southern Ohio, illuminate well-crafted essays...
| Author | Emily Whaley |
| ISBN | 0684843870 |
The vibrant, opinionated, and totally engaging voice of eighty-five-year-old Emily Whaley transforms a guided tour of one of the most visited private gardens in America into a magical adventure, alive with tidbits of advice and deeply moving reflections.Gardeners are not the only ones who will...
| Author | Beverley Nichols |
| ISBN | 0881927295 |
This reprint of the third book in Nichols's Allways trilogy contains a new foreword by Bryan Connon, Beverley Nichols's biographer. Set in the English countryside, the hilarious memoir is as much about the author's love for plants as it is about the village in which he lived. The depictions of flowers...
Pasquale's Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town
| Author | Michael Rips |
| ISBN | 0316748641 |
This book is a quick read, only 200 pages but full of amusing anecdotes and Italian eccentrics, an interesting mix of historical fact and myth, as well as the author's reflections on life in a small hilltop town called Sutri.
Sutri is in the Tuscia, where I live, so the book was of particular interest....
At Home in France: Tales of an American and Her House Abroad
| Author | Ann Barry |
| ISBN | 0345407873 |
Ann Barry was a single woman, working and living in New York, when she fell in love with a charming house in Carennac in southwestern France. Even though she knew it was the stuff of fantasy, even though she knew she would rarely be able to spend more than four weeks a year there, she was hooked. This spirited,...
Snowball Oranges: One Mallorcan Winter
| Author | Peter Kerr |
| ISBN | 1786850427 |
When the Kerr family leave Scotland to grow oranges in a secluded valley on the island of Mallorca, they are surprised to be greeted by the same freezing weather they have left behind. Then they realize that their new orange farm is a bit of a lemon. . . . Laughter, finds Peter Kerr, is the best medicine when...
Remembrance of Things Paris: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet (Modern Library Food)
| Author | Ruth Reichl |
| ISBN | 0679643095 |
A glorious, edible tour of Paris through six decades of writing from Gourmet magazine, edited and introduced by Ruth Reichl
For sixty years the best food writers have been sending dispatches from Paris to Gourmet. Collected here for the first time, their essays create a unique and timeless...
Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation
| Author | Andrea Wulf |
| ISBN | 0307269906 |
From the author of the acclaimed The Brother Gardeners, a fascinating look at the founding fathers from the unique and intimate perspective of their lives as gardeners, plantsmen, and farmers.
For the founding fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions, as deeply...
Time To Be In Earnest: A Fragment Of Autobiography
| Author | P.D. James |
| ISBN | 0345442121 |
On the day she turned seventy-seven, internationally acclaimed mystery writer P. D. James embarked on an endeavor unlike any other in her distinguished career: she decided to write a personal memoir in the form of a diary. Over the course of a year she set down not only the events and impressions of her...
A Family in Paris: Stories of Food, Life and Adventure
| Author | Jane Paech |
| ISBN | 1921382368 |
When Australian Jane Paech moves to Paris, her visions of afternoons in bijou bistros and bookshops on the Left Bank are kept in check by the needs of a young family and a long to-do list that includes apartment-hunting, school selection, and multiple trips to IKEA.
Through a collection of sharp...
A Love Affair With Southern Cooking: Recipes And Recollections
| Author | Jean Anderson |
| ISBN | 0060761784 |
More than a cookbook, this is the story of how a little girl, born in the South of Yankee parents, fell in love with southern cooking at the age of five. And a bite of brown sugar pie was all it took.
"I shamelessly wangled supper invitations from my playmates," Anderson admits. "But I was on a voyage...
| Author | Katherine Swift |
| ISBN | 0747592586 |
I'm always envious of multi talented people. I'd settle for just the one! Katherine Swift is a gifted garden designer and gardener, plus she writes like a dream.
I liked the mixture of personal memoir mixed with a journey through the Book of Hours, a nod to the Monastic history of the house.
The...
Houseboat on the Seine: A Memoir
| Author | William Wharton |
| ISBN | 1557042721 |
The title brings to mind a luxury vessel on the most glamorous river in the world, but readers expecting to learn about the high life in France will be in for a surprise. In this charming memoir, painter and novelist Wharton (Birdy) instead gives us literally the nuts and bolts of building a houseboat,...
My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard Into a Farm
| Author | Manny Howard |
| ISBN | 1416585168 |
For seven months, Manny Howard—a lifelong urbanite—woke up every morning and ventured into his eight-hundred-square-foot backyard to maintain the first farm in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in generations. His goal was simple: to subsist on what he could produce on this farm, and only this farm, for...
The subtitle of this book is "Essays of a Sometime Farmer" but it seems to me that Perrin has done enough work to call himself a full-time farmer.
Perrin's writing is somewhat inconsistent but the essays are overall enjoyable. Particularly the aspects of maple sugaring and his "recipe" for...
