Nature & Gardening Books | How-To Guides, Memoir, Cozy Mystery, History, & FUN! | Olive City Oasis

9 Nature-Themed Books, Many Genres, Even POISON! I highly recommend all these books and am excited to share them with you!

Hi, I’m Kim! Welcome to Olive City Oasis and my 2.5 acre Zone 9B property here in Northern California.

Along with my regular perennial garden and fruit orchard content, from this point forward (Feb 2024) I’ll also be doing regular bookish videos! I’ve noticed that many gardeners like reading and many readers like gardening, and that certainly describes me. So if you’re interested in this type of simple, cozy, interesting, and informational content, just click the link below to subscribe.

On my channel, I like to emphasize easy gardening anyone can do, simple living garden ideas, and self-care through nature because I believe these things are very important to our physical and emotional well-being. My permaculture mindset has me constantly planting more perennial plants, and my fruit and nut orchard is continually growing, too!

Experimenting in the garden is such fun, and so is using my fruits, veggies, and herbs in the kitchen, so I frequently share simple living garden recipes on my channel. If any of this sounds interesting to you, be sure to subscribe — just click below!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/OliveCityOasis

You can get in touch with me here:
kim@olivecityoasis.com

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Titles & Authors of the Nine Books I Showcased in this Video —

1. How to Grow Perennial Vegetables: Low-maintenance, Low-impact Vegetable Gardening
by Martin Crawford
2. Grow Your Own Tea: The Complete Guide to Cultivating, Harvesting, and Preparing
by Christine Parks and Susan Walcott
3. One Bad Apple (#1 in ‘An Orchard Mystery’ series) by Sheila Connolly
4. A Peach of a Murder (#1 in ‘A Fresh-Baked Mystery’ series) by Livia J Washburn
Also, it turns out my memory failed me. (I’m getting older, you know!) The first book is all about peaches, but each of the other books in the series focuses on baked goods made from a different fruit. The vibe stays the same though, and now I’m even more eager to read through the entire series again this coming summer!
5. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
6. An Almost Impossible Thing: The Radical Lives of Britain’s Pioneering Women Gardeners
by Fiona Davison
7. Floriography by Jessica Roux
8. Gardening Can Be Murder: How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Mystery Writers by Marta McDowell
9. The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly (with recipes)
by Kate Lebo

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2 MORE VIDEOS I think you’ll enjoy!

~~Three GREAT Gardening BOOKS ~ For Those Who Love to Experiment~~

In this older video, I share three excellent gardening books with you, each with their own unique emphasis. The first beautifully explores the world of growing plants for creating your own herb and fruit teas. Another is an incredibly interesting look at unusual edible plants and trees you can grow. So many great ones! The last book is written by the experienced British gardener Carol Klein, and she shares in extensive detail (along with gorgeous, detailed photos!) how to propagate almost any plant you want!

~~Grow Red Roselle Hibiscus! Make TEA – So GOOD, So Nutritious! – NESCO Dehydrator Review!

Harvest, Dry, & Make Rosella TEA – so easy! Rosella has 9x the Vitamin C of citrus! Let Nature Heal You! These multi-purpose, gorgeous flowers and calyces provide beauty along with a calming, nutritious tea. You can even make amazing jam and scones with Red Roselle Hibiscus, but that’s another video!

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Thanks so much for joining me today! Please share in the comments a couple of *your* favorite nature or garden books. I’d love to check them out!

May your days be filled with the peace and calm that only comes from nature!
Happy Reading!

Until next time, Kim

In today’s video I’m going to share with you some great nature and gardening books which I absolutely love first up I’m going to talk to you about two practical but beautiful gardening how-to books that I read last year and I’m super excited to let you know about next

I’ll share with you two interesting non-fiction books that focus on gardening that I am currently reading and they’re both so good I can’t put either one down then I’m going to share with you about two mystery series they’re lovely comfy cozy mystery series one of them is set in an apple orchard

And the other a peach orchard and of course they both include lots of delicious recipes at the end of the book and I know they’re delicious cuz I have tried them myself then I’ve got two super fun books that focus on nature in unusual ways and that’s going to be

Almost at the end of the video so make sure you stay tuned to see what those are I think you’re definitely going to be surprised and I think you’re definitely going to like them then the final book I’m going to share with you is a library book I just borrowed the

Other day and I’ve already started reading it I’m actually reading it for a February foodie readathon that I saw on the untrained librarian Channel and she had a lot of great ideas but I already had this particular book and I have several others on my shelves that I want

To get to for this particular readathon and in one way or another they all have to do with gardening and fruit orchards but today I’m just going to share this one particular one that I got from the library that I think you will love so that’s nine nature and gardening books

And I’m sure that at least a few of them are going to uh peek your interest in have you looking to either borrow or buy them very soon so first I have how to grow perennial vegetables low maintenance low impact vegetable gardening by Martin Crawford now I love

Martin Mar Crawford as an author and this book is great like all his books are first 60 Pages he explains why we should be growing perennial vegetables and then talks about the best ways to grow them starting with the basics the soil but also just how to maintain them

How to harvest them everything really that you would need to know to get going with perennial vegetables the bulk of the book though from page 65 up through I think it’s like 205 it’s all gorgeous just photos of these perennial vegetables one by one he discusses these

Vegetables and he tells you you know how Hardy they are what zones they grow best in how to cultivate them how to get them to produce the best also their culinary uses maybe any problems they might uh tend towards just all sorts of useful information and then at the very end of

The book he has a valuable chart that includes all the Latin names and common names of these perennial vegetables in addition to you know various other names they have started to go by Through The Years just a super helpful book to have so educational but beautiful and it

Works if you’re an aspiring food Forester like me with couple acres of property or more or even if you just have a small patio Garden the next book is how to grow your own tea the complete guide to cultivating harvesting and preparing and this book is by Christine

Parks and Susan Walcott now when it says complete guide that is what it means it has the history of tea where it grows best in the states and around the world different types of tea what kind of compounds are in tea how best of course

To grow it whether to start it from seed and if so how so and also you know how to best get it to grow and produce how to prune it how to harvest it and how to use it of course to make tea but also even in cooking I really love this book

I do grow now Chamilia cinus plants they take several years before you can start harvesting them but I look forward to that day and even now I want to educate myself so I know best how to well make use of those tea leaves when I get the

Chance and also as this book teaches how to propagate these tea plants so if you have any interest yourself in the world of growing your own tea then be sure to check out this book all right now we have a couple of cozy Mysteries I do love a good mystery whether it’s Agatha

Chrisy some of the Contemporary Mysteries that are out now today and cozy Mysteries they’re probably my favorite because their themes so often are either really interesting about a topic I love learning about or they’re related to gardening somehow and these two as I said before are set in orchards

In the first one One Bad Apple we have an apple orchard of course it’s in Massachusetts and this book is number one in a 12 book series I have read them all and I love them like all cozy Mysteries there are murderers involved but they’re not too violent or gory at

Least you don’t read about that part it’s all fun seeing if you can follow along with the clues the way that the amateur sleuth in the book is doing and if you can solve the mystery before they do usually you can’t but that’s okay it’s still super entertaining and in the

Case of Orchard Mysteries there are almost always delicious recipes in the back for you to experiment with and I have definitely done that with the recipes in this series now in this particular series Meg is the protagonist and her mother has recently inherited a 200y old farmhouse and a 15 acre apple

Orchard and Meg in a bad way at the moment comes to help her mother out she decides to renovate this place and take over the apple orchard herself it’s a little more than she bargained for but she’s pretty determined to see it through gets a little more complicated

Though when a dead body is found in her new septic tank now this Orchard mystery Series starts with book one a peach of a murder is by Liv J wasburn and there are 15 books in this series although if you go online you might only find the first

14 unless you do a little extra digging and that’s because the first 14 were traditionally published but then Livia published the 15th one uh independently and all of her books have rave reviews including the most recent one the 15th one that was uh published in 2021 I

Believe and I just love this series so does everyone else apparently so obviously it’s a peach orchard mystery with that title and it is set in in Texas and the protagonist of this series is Phyllis she’s a retired widowed school teacher who is in her late 6s and

Very very sweet everyone just thinks so highly of her and she she really is sweet however when the annual Peach Festival comes around every year she does become very competitive she really wants to win and this year’s no exception except that a dead body turns up and so Phyllis turns amateur sleuth

And it’s so entertaining I love these books and actually I’m thinking of rereading them the whole series this summer now for the non-fiction books that I’m currently reading and enjoying a lot the first is wintering the power of rest and retreat in difficult times by Katherine may this book was published

In 2020 and is a New York Times bestseller and it meets such a real need it goes into how during challenging times in your life you need to Winter or basically hibernate now most of us tend to do this naturally however we often feel guilty about it and in this book

Katherine May goes about showing us why we should not feel guilty why we should accept this wintering understanding the many benefits of it now the book is structured in that each chapter is a different month September being the lead in it’s when she when she wrote the book

Um faced a lot of difficult things going on in her life all at once and that kind of sent her down this spiral towards wintering so it’s sort of the prologue and then October through March we have the actual winter each being a different chapter each focusing on a different

Element and it is just so refreshing and comforting to read this book and then at the very end late March we hit Spring and that is definitely how it feels you’re coming out of it you know things are going to be okay and you have benefited from that time you spent

Resting the other fascinating non-fiction book I’m currently reading I learned about through another YouTube channel that’s what Vivy did next and several months ago she was talking about some books she was reading she does that often and this time she was talking about this book and I immediately

Ordered it and don’t know why I haven’t read it until now except that I have piles and piles of books to read and they all look so good but I’m very much loving it at this point and this book is an almost impossible thing the radical lives of Britain’s pioneering women

Gardeners by Fiona Davidson so Fiona Davidson was the head of libraries and exhibits at the Royal Horticultural Society and she discovered a cach of letters from A young girl named Olive who had been denied a scholarship by The Royal Horticultural Society and it got her to thinking and started her

Researching the broader problem that women gardeners or aspiring women gardeners faced during the years leading up to World War I before women had the vote now this book follows six different women ranging in age from 15 to mid-30s and examines how they went about breaking into the professional world of

Gardening at a time when it absolutely wasn’t allowed for women you have to remember that at this time really no professional work was allowed for women of the middle or upper class in Britain certainly lower class women were allowed to work they were expected to work but

Middle and upper class women they were expected to marry and if they didn’t marry they were seen as a burden really on society the beginning of chapter 1 in this book really U expresses that sentiment very well let me read it for you in March 1910 readers of the Daily

Mail were confronted with an advertisement which read 10,000 th000 English women could be ranged in a line and shot no one would be sorry everyone would be glad there isn’t any place for them this was pretty strong stuff but it was just an extreme example of a widely

Held belief the country was burdened with Surplus women it was estimated that in 1854 there were 500,000 more women than men in Britain and less than 40 years later in 1891 there were over 900 ,000 more women than men so they really felt like they had a big problem and

Their answer of course was to uh send all these Surplus women off to say Australia where they could be married and be of use women saw it a little differently however they wanted the vote and they wanted to be allowed to work and one of the jobs they wanted to get

Into was gardening I’ve been really intrigued by what I’m learning in this book so far a lot more going on here a lot more at stake than what you might think on the surface and I look forward W to giving a much Fuller review at some

Point in the future once I finished it completely but yes an almost impossible thing if you’re a woman Gardener I definitely think you should get this book just discovered my light was going it’s one of those gray days and the sun was peeking out from behind the clouds

But it disappeared so I’ve turned on some more lights hopefully you can see me just fine we’re almost to the end of the video but we’ve got three titles left and these two are the fun ones I promised you a little unusual but really nice first I have floriography an

Illustrated Guide to the Victorian language of flowers by Jess Ru each double page spread has an illustrated flower now I’m not an artist but I think maybe they were done with colored pencils you can correct me if I’m wrong but they are so lovely and on the opposite page the flower that’s being

Highlighted has several things explained about it first of all we’re given the scientific name then we’re given the meaning the origin and some flowers it can be paired with for specific occasions so in the case of crysanthemum now the scientific name of chrysanthemum happens to be chrysanthemum as to the

Origin it talks about the fact that chrysanthemums are often used at funerals and placed on graves throughout Europe and this flower is thought to be a token of comfort in a time of grief suggested pairings are Willow for friend and grief or gladiolas for a friend with

A broken heart how about doas or some people say delas here in Northern California though we do say doia now the scientific name happens to be the same Dalia and I guess I just picked two where that uh was the case now the meaning of Dalia is eternal love or

Commitment now this flower was frequently used in wedding bouquet in the Victorian era and it’s often called the queen of the autumnn garden because if you’ve ever grown it you know it blooms well into the fall one of the suggested pairings for the Dalia is a

Tulip to be given as a gift to a newly engaged couple now before I got this book I knew nothing of the language of flowers well I knew that roses meant love and I think don’t yellow roses mean a returning love or something like that I don’t know so anyway obviously I

Needed this book to teach me some things and I am enjoying looking through it I’m actually going through a few pages every evening it’s very relaxing not sure how much of it’s going to stick with me since I’m not like quizzing myself or anything maybe I should do that hm maybe

I’ll give that a try I should at least learn the meanings of the flowers I grow here right how are you at knowing the meanings of the flowers you grow all right on to the next book this is one of my favorites to share with you today

Right up my alley it’s called gardening can be murder how poisonous poppies Sinister shovels and Grim Gardens have inspired mystery writers and this book is so good oh it really ties together mystery writers and the stories they tell to poisonous Sinister plants and I love it the author Marta mcdal has

Actually written other books about gardening where she highlights one particular author and I also have the book she wrote about Emily Dickinson and her garden and how that influenced her poetry but this one she goes through and highlights many different mystery writers Through The Years from Edgar

Alan Poe to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to many uh current day contemporary mystery writers and she shows how they use gardening within their books either as motivators to get them thinking of a plot or as a murder weapon or as maybe a setting she constantly refers to all

Sorts of authors and books and stories that have me so interested I’m compiling quite a long list that I need to investigate and see what else I want to read that pertains to this topic it is quite interesting to see how authors come up with their ideas and how they

Insert them so seamlessly into their stories and when it’s a mystery well all the better of course I’m not taking any of these ideas for myself um not going to be planting any poisonous plants at least not for the purpose of murder but maybe for the purpose of inspiring my

Writing all right the very last book the one I borrowed from the library the other day that I’m going to be reading for the February foodie readathon it is called the book of difficult fruit Arguments for the tart tender and unruly with recipes and it’s by Kate Libo now

I’ve never heard of Kate Libo before but apparently she is a naturalist and a poet and writes beautifully in fact on the back of this book one of the many uh blurs one of the many recommendation quotes is from an author I really love Amy Stewart who wrote the drunken

Botanist among other books she says Kate Lebo is the best kind of poet naturalist her writing is Savage and lyrical and scientific all at once now the structure of this book is quite unique she has 26 chapters for the 26 letters of the alphabet there is one

Chapter in the middle that is quite different but all the rest the uh letter is the beginning of the name of an unusual tart tender or unruly fruit now how are these fruits difficult well in many varying ways maybe they have a very narrow window of time to harvest them

Maybe they tend to overrun a garden maybe they’re quite difficult to harvest full of thorns and such but one way or another most people consider them difficult now each of these chapters is an essay written so beautifully and so meaningfully it’s amazing really how Kate Leo connects these fruits and the

Way we grow them and harvest them and prepare them to other aspects of our life let me read to you a bit from the fly leaf to explain this a bit more the these fruits will take you on unexpected turns and give sideways insights into relationships self-care land stewardship

Medical and Botanical history and much more now I saw some familiar fruits in here in fact I grow some of them uh rhubarb Quint pomegranate medlar but there are also a lot I don’t grow and it was really interesting to learn more about them but mostly to see how she

Tied them into to our lives just a really worthwhile book I’m about halfway through and really enjoying it if like me you are of a curious nature and you love good beautiful writing you will enjoy this book so thanks so much for joining me today and listening to my

Sharing about these books about nature and gardening and I hope you enjoyed it more than that I hope that you took away from this some books that you’re going to go out and read yourself and if so let me know in the comments below also let me know any book titles you think

Are great nature and gardening books that I should read so until next time happy gardening and happy reading