Daryl Beyers - The New Gardeners Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Grow a Beautiful and Bountiful Garden

I never set out to become a professional gardener. Gardening, quite simply, was the career that happened to me. My life with plants started while pursuing a college degree in environmental design, but I also learned from the ground up while working on landscape crews and at garden centers. After graduation I traveled the country making gardens for family, friends, friends of family, and family of friendsanyone who would let me dig holes in their yard. I even published some magazine articles on gardening, and when I landed a job as head gardener on a ten-acre estate, my life in gardening really began to flourish.

My mission, as I saw it, was to keep every plant in that garden alive, which was crazy. The first lesson every new gardener learns is that plants die. Second, try as we might, not every plant in our care will thrive. Since then I have learned those lessons and more while working in many other gardens, as both a gardener and a designer. Ive continued to write for magazines and worked as a gardening editor and photographer, but it was as an instructor at the New York Botanical Garden that my philosophy of how to become a successful gardener developed. This led to the book you hold in your hands, where I share knowledge and advice harvested from my years of learning, doing, and teaching gardening.

Gardening is an intuitive art grounded in our understanding of a most basic and age-old pursuit. Gardening is also based on science. This book will encourage the intuitive gardener in you and help you learn the fundamental science of how plants grow and what they need in order to thrive. We start with the roots and the shootsthinking about why we garden, your particular aims and dreams, and the basic botany of how plants work. From there we inquire into the living soil, the foundation upon which all gardens grow. Next comes plant selection, how to choose what to grow. The chapters that follow teach the hands-on gardening skills of starting plants from seeds, planting, mulching, watering, and feeding. Then, with a grasp of how to grow plants, we come to the advanced tasks of vegetative propagation and pruning. We end with the not-so-nice but unavoidable reality of dealing with weeds, pests, and diseases.

You can trust me to help you become a successful gardener. Thats my goal in the classroom, and its the purpose of this book. Gardeners grow by gardening, and to become a true gardener you must also learn to have fun in the garden. There is no fun in fretting, fussing, or worrying. Let your small successes build your confidence. Learn from your mistakes. Its a matter of entering the flow, forgetting your day-to-day cares, and linking your nature with the nature all around you. If youre ready for that, lets get started.

Plants lead relatively straightforward lives. They sprout, grow, and reproduce. Gardening teaches us how to participate in this life cycle, helping when we can and leaving well enough alone when we must.

Gardening is part faith in the future and part lessons from the past, but mostly its the quality of our actions in the present that distinguish success from failure. The daily tasks, the doing, not the planning or reviewing, truly make a garden. Gardening is a live-in-the-moment activity with wonderful rewards reaped long after the hard work is done. Planting is an investment in the futurethe gardens future, the gardeners future, and of course the future of the plants going into the ground.

Many people are drawn to gardening because they want to connect with nature, create beauty around their home, and/or grow food.

This investment in the future starts before we dig a hole. It starts when we decide to garden, when we choose to assume responsibility for living things and bring them home. Knowing why we want to garden, having a plot of land and a plan for it, having a few good tools, and knowing something about the living things we are going to populate our garden with are necessary first steps.

Ive taught hundreds of new gardeners how to garden, and the reasons they take my classes are varied yet predictable. The one goal they all share is a desire to connect with nature, to learn how to grow plants and interact successfully with the living environment. Other popular reasons my students want to garden are to create beauty around the home and to grow food.

Every gardener is unique, and it is from these primary aspirations that more general reasons to garden increase the motivation to grow. We want to enjoy the outdoors, relieve stress, spend time exercising or relaxing in fresh air and sunshine, express our creativity, or enjoy a sense of accomplishment. Those desires then lead to more specific objectives, such as growing show-quality cut flowers, building a plant collection, or creating habitat for pollinators and other wildlife.

New gardeners may start with a practical goal such as increasing the value of their home by surrounding it with healthy landscape plants, but in time they may find they have learned how to heal a damaged ecosystem through sustainable gardening practices or reduce energy use by providing shade and windbreaks for the house. Whatever the reason we get gardening, our focused engagement with plants and the land will shape our experiences as gardeners.

Many people start gardening out of necessity when they find themselves the owners of a plot of land surrounding their house. Others just want to garden and find that any bit of ground will do, even planters on a city terrace or pots on a fire escape. I gardened extensivelywith permissionin the backyards of rented houses and apartments. Today I tend a small personal plot and mostly garden vicariously at client properties and by giving advice to students. Whatever your situation is, its important to have a basic plan before you start planting.

When planning a garden, you can start with either the plants or the plot. I like to start with the site. Assess the sun, the soil, and the topography, and consider what you can grow under those conditions. Lets say, for example, that you want a vegetable garden. Most vegetables thrive in the sun, so if your backyard is filled with large trees and dense shade, either rethink what you will grow or alter conditions by editing the trees. But consider carefully. Are some tomatoes and peppers worth the destruction of a hundred-year-old oak tree? Maybe a woodland garden makes more sense. Soil, as you will learn later, can be improved, but slopes make a difference. Flat spaces are easy to plan and plant, while hillsides present problems but also opportunities for structures, like retaining walls and terraces. Low spots will collect water and, depending on the drainage, may offer the right conditions for water-loving plants.