A Woman's Garden: Grow Beautiful Plants and Make Useful Things - Plants and Projects for Home, Health, Beauty, Healing, and More

by Tanya Anderson

Overview

Led by beautiful photography, take an inspirational tour around the garden for helpful growing advice and step-by-step instructions for creating over 35 projects, edibles, and art from your garden.

In A Woman’s Garden, the creative force behind LovelyGreens.com, Tanya Anderson, shares the great variety of ways you can use the power of plants for home and health.

Gardens grow more than just pretty flowers. They grow well-being and a deeper connection with nature. Gardens can also produce plant material for creating homemade skincare, natural dyes, artisan crafts, delicious foods and beverages, and medicines—homegrown ways to create a wholesome lifestyle.

Making things with your hands and heart, and then sharing the fruits of your labors with friends and family, is both satisfying and soul-stirring. Learn how to grow dozens of plants and then transform them into gorgeous items to nurture yourself or gift to others. 

• Visit the kitchen garden where you will find tips for growing your own produce and learn how to make a strawberry planter from a pallet.
• Embrace the joys of edible flowers—learn to make floral ice cubes and food featuring flowers, both savory and sweet.
• Enjoy the flavors and scents of culinary herbs, which you will learn to use to enhance cooking oils, drinks, and pasta.
• Grow and harvest plants and flowers to make skin care products such as herbal bath fizzies, lavender and alkanet soap, and more.
• Grow plants for herbal medicine, including chamomile for calming tea and calendula for healing minor cuts and scrapes.
• Cultivate an array of plants with uses around the home, including rosemary and citrus kitchen-cleaning spray and lavender for scenting linens.
• Brighten your world with plants for dyeing wool and cloth—learn methods for extracting color from a rainbow of different plants, including goldenrod, onions, and butterfly pea flower.
• Make a garden that overflows with creativity by crafting garden makes such as fossil imprint stepping-stones, papier-mache leaf lanterns, and pressed flower candles.

In addition to a wealth of hands-on projects, you’ll take a trip around the globe and visit the gardens of 8 women, including Deanna Talerico from Homestead and Chill, Ashlie Thomas from The Mocha Gardener, Melissa Will from The Empress of Dirt, Rekha Mistry from Rekha’s Garden and Kitchen, Giovanna Becker from Herbstead, in addition to several others.

Find inspiration, healing, health, and happiness right outside your own backdoor with A Woman's Garden.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780760368404
Publisher:	Cool Springs Press
Publication date:	04/27/2021
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	866,411
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Tanya Anderson is an organic gardener, soap maker, beekeeper, and beauty producer on the Isle of Man in the UK. Tanya is the creative force behind the website and YouTube channel Lovely Greens. Followers subscribe to her for her creative garden ideas and positive, friendly personality. 

When she's not publishing gardening and plant-based beauty ideas, she's retailing her own line of beauty products. Lovely Greens Handmade crafts natural soaps, beeswax skincare products, and candles. She also hosts monthly creative workshops, is a regular gardening-guest on an a local radio station, and helps manage an allotment (community garden).

Table of Contents

Introduction 8

The Edible Garden

1 The Kitchen Garden 13

Deanna's Garden 14

Gallery of Homegrown Produce 18

Creating a New Vegetable Garden 20

Pallet Strawberry Planter 26

Growing Salad Greens 30

A Berry Delicious Garden 33

Low-Maintenance Edibles 36

2 Edible Flowers 39

Jan's Garden 40

Gallery of Edible Flowers 44

Edible Flowers in Your Garden 46

Edible Flower Planter 50

Floral Ice Cubes 53

Edible Flower Frittata 55

Lavender Shortbread 59

3 Culinary Herbs 61

Rekha's Garden 62

Gallery of Culinary Herbs 66

Growing Culinary Herbs 68

DIY Herb Spiral 72

Herb-Infused Oil 75

Three-Mint Mojito 77

Herb-Embedded Pasta 79

Health and Beauty

4 Plants for Skin Care 83

Tanya's Garden 84

Gallery of Skin Care Plants 88

Growing Plants for Skin Care 90

Creating Botanical Extracts 94

Rose Petal Facial Mist 97

Herbal Bath Fizzies 100

Lavender and Alkanet Soap 102

5 Herbal Medicine 107

Giovanna's Garden 108

Gallery of Medicinal Plants 112

A Home Herbalist's Garden 114

Growing Chamomile for Tea 117

Chamomile Tincture 120

Calendula Skin Salve 121

Lemon Balm Cold Sore Balm 122

Home and Crafts

6 Herbs for the Home 123

Ashlie's Garden 124

Gallery of Plants for the Home 128

Growing a Home Garden 130

Raised Garden Bed 136

Rosemary and Citrus Kitchen Spray 140

Natural Wood Furniture Polish 142

Soapwort Multipurpose Cleaner 143

7 Natural Plant Dyes 145

Teresinha's Garden 146

Gallery of Plants with Natural Color 150

Growing a Dye Garden 152

Using Dye Plants 155

Dyeing Yarn with Onion Skins 159

Naturally Coloring Handmade Soap 162

8 The Crafty Garden 165

Melissa's Garden 166

Gallery of Creative Garden Makes 170

A Creative and Low-Cost Garden 172

Fossil Imprint Stepping-Stone 175

Pressed Flower Candles 178

Papier-Mâché Leaf Lanterns 180

A Word of Thanks 184

About the Author 185

Index 186

Editorial Reviews

02/15/2021

Lovely Greens blogger Anderson celebrates “plants and the women who tend them” in her beautiful and encouraging debut. Chapters are organized into three sections—“The Edible Garden,” “Health and Beauty,” and “Home and Crafts”—and each features a “woman-made paradise,” how-tos, and recipes. “The Kitchen Garden” profiles Deanna Talerico’s California produce garden, shows how to make a strawberry planter, and offers advice for growing low-maintenance edible plants. A chapter on herbal medicine includes a recipe for a lemon cold-sore balm and showcases Giovanna Becker’s garden in Germany, with its emphasis on such herbs as feverfew and echinacea (“Before we had doctors... we had plants,” Anderson writes). “Natural Plant Dyes” shows how Teresinha Roberts uses the array of plants in her U.K. garden to create dyes. Charts appear throughout and offer such information as ideal growing temperatures and edible flowers’ flavor profiles, and there’s no shortage of step-by-step projects for the garden and beyond: readers can learn to dye yarn with onion skins or make a permaculture herb spiral. Anderson’s wide-ranging survey is sure to delight gardeners looking to find a niche or try something new. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"An inspiring, galvanizing, and hugely practical guide to growing and using your garden for health and wellbeing, both inside and out. This will help anybody to understand the healing nature of plants and how the relationship between women and our gardens can benefit both us and the plants we nurture." —Frances Tophill, presenter for BBC Gardeners' World and ITV's Love Your Garden

"What a delightful book this is - full of fresh, exciting ideas and filled with projects for anyone who loves their garden. It does what all good gardening books should do, which is to make you want to rush out to your own plot and start planting." —Constance Craig Smith, Garden Media Guild co-chair

"This book is a treat for the eyes and felt like balm for the mind. Filled with beautiful, rich photographs and tours through cleverly designed gardens from eight creative female gardeners. It offers a perfect mix of information, inspiration, and ideas to try at home."—Liz Zorab, author of Grounded, and gardening personality behind Byther Farm

"A Woman’s Garden is an inspiring, beautiful, and also practical book. It taps into today’s desire to grow our own food and create things from plants, such as homemade skincare, candles, and plant dyes. There are eight gardeners and their gardens featured, each of which specializes in a different plant food or craft, plus useful projects as to how to make soap, planters, floral ice-cubes, and more. And Tanya explains how to start growing and using plants in an easy-to-follow and readable way." —Alexandra Campbell of the Middlesized Garden

‘ A celebration of femininity in the garden and an innovative and important book, this will expand the horizons of seasoned gardeners, while being accessible for beginners.’
 
 —Jack Wallington, RHS The Garden

From the Publisher