Michael B. Emery

America's favorite flora are the homey ray flowers, a tribe featuring daisies, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, dahlias, coneflowers, and black-eyed Susans, combined with the elegant, multifaceted rose. Children pick ray flowers for their prepubescent crush or for their mom; when they get older, they graduate to the rose, a more sophisticated choice. Both high culture and pop culture embrace floral imagery; think of Annie Liebovitz's famous nude photograph of Bette Midler blanketed in long-stemmed American Beauties on the cover of Rolling Stone, or zombies featured in a Wars of the Roses comic book. Thousands of postcards and greeting cards are covered in a sea of roses and ray flowers. Meet Daisy Mae, see Daisy the dog, and view the presidential Rose Garden, as well as influential American and European works of art. These images are combined with the history and romance of our favorite flowers. A nonallergenic floral extravaganza!

These 580+ juicy images capture the fact that throughout history, artists and artisans have depicted vegetables in remarkable ways. Still lifes, photographs, amusing antique postcards, seed packet art—all sorts of vegetable illustrations have been created to arouse physical and aesthetic appetites, and they are displayed here together with interesting botanical and historical insights. This wealth of vegetable art includes paintings by American artists like Lily Martin Spencer, Ernest Lawson, and Charles Demuth; engravings and lithographs by major printmaking companies like Louis Prang and Company; botanical illustrations; and commercial images drawn from vintage catalogs and seed packets. Vegetables are represented in colorful glory, from the hundreds we appreciate daily—like tomatoes, potatoes, peas, and carrots—to less-familiar vegetables like sea kale, cardoon, and walking onions.

A detailed overview of the inter-relationship between heirloom seeds and heritage gardens, richly illustrated with over 650 images, many of rare, historical importance. Heritage, or traditional, gardens and heirloom seeds are joined at the hip, but previous books have separated them. This is the first holistic look at several of the most vibrant trends in contemporary horticulture, both in vegetables and flowers. Lavishly illustrated, it is a how-to manual, a history, and a guide to gardens and historic landscapes. The basics of heritage garden design from California to the East Coast are here, with special attention to the Pennsylvania four-square garden. Plans and suggestions for your garden are included, and seed-saving techniques are clearly enumerated. A gallery of heirloom plants and lists of suppliers are featured. There are travel suggestions for visiting gardens ranging from Bethabara Park in North Carolina, to The Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum in Pennsylvania, to the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia. This book is sure to delight historians, traditionalists, green thumbs, and horticulturists alike.

Throughout history, especially from the 18th century to the beginning of World War II, artists have produced a remarkable wealth of graphic representations of fruit. This volume includes paintings by American artists, including the Peale family, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton, engravings and lithographs by major printmaking companies like Currier and Ives, botanical illustrations, and excerpts from vintage nursery catalogs. Find hundreds of illustrations, chosen to arouse physical and aesthetic appetites. These include still lifes, photographs, and amusing antique postcards, as well as expert botanical and historical information. Fruit you know and some you may not are illustrated here in unique works of art or artifacts. They include standards like apples, cherries, and grapes, tropicals such as bananas, mangoes and avocados, biblical fruits, including pomegranates, dates, and olives, and rare delicacies like medlars, persimmons, prickly cactus pears, and pawpaws. Fruit has never looked this good.