I love the title of this book. It lends itself to all sorts of vocal inflections, from “arch” to “zoned out”. And it’s tough to abbreviate, meaning that when it is spoken of around the office it often comes out really fast, as in: “SoYouWannaBeAGardenDesigner.” That, or every word is pronounced carefully, distinctly, with perfect enunciation.

But the title is purely a bonus. I’ve never personally felt the urge to be a garden designer, but I was thoroughly impressed by this book. Love Albrecht Howard’s writing is so clear, friendly, and informative — I felt that I could apply her excellent advice to any creative or business venture and  have a better chance of success. Ms. Howard manages that difficult combination of being encouraging, tactful, and practical. She does not pretend that it will be easy, but she makes you believe that even the hard stuff is important, and that you can make it through the hard stuff, and do it well.

Here’s the table of contents. She even has chapters on leaving the business, and how to deal with self-doubt. I don’t think I have any friends who aspire to be garden designers, but the minute I discover that ambition, I already know exactly what to get them.

1. The Journey from Gardener to Designer

2. Turning Your Passion into Your Profession

3. Beyond Horticulture 101

4. The Green Industry: A Greener Shade of Green

5. Pathways, Walls, and Fences

6. Patios, Decks, and Other Living Spaces

7. Water Features

8. Spas, Pools, and Poolscaping

9. Irrigation, Drainage, and Lighting

10. Occupational Hazards: Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

11. Defining Your Business and Getting Your Name Out There

12. Basics of Running a Small Business

13. Working with Nurseries and Other Suppliers

14. Working with Subcontractors

15. Now You Have a Client! The Design Process

16. Construction: Where the Shovel Meets the Load

17. When Things Go Wrong

18. The Business Grows

19. But Am I Any Good?

20. Exiting Gracefully

A Final Word of Encouragement

There are certain things we do for every new book. Sending out review copies to sales people and the media is one of these. But every so often we really want a book to make a splash and try to do something unique.

Tom Fischer is very special to us. He is our editor-in-chief, our resident foodie who eats at least once from every new food cart, and—as of today—one of our spring authors. His newest book, The Gardener’s Color Palette, releases today. And we obviously had to do something special for it.

The Gardener’s Color Palette is a pure celebration of color in the garden. Tom has taken ten color categories and picked the best ten flowers that represent them. Add to that his great wit and obvious passion for flowers and you have a winner. To celebrate, we decided to gussy up our samples with some colored tissue paper and ribbons.

Wrapping 110 books doesn’t sound like much fun if it is you alone in the office. But by inviting the whole office, adding a dose of red wine, pink champagne, and addictive white cheddar popcorn, a thankless task quickly become a party. And a competition. Olivia Dunn flexed her muscles, wrapped the most presents, and took home the crown (er, the chocolate bar).

Now all that is left is getting them into the mail. And something tells me the mail man won’t be able to rely on my awesome office mates for help.

We are giving away three copies of Macro Photography for Gardeners and Nature Lovers! See the end of this post for details.

I’m not what one would call a visual person. When it comes to taking pictures something always feels a bit off. I know what I want the picture to look like, but getting the camera to cooperate doesn’t always work.

When Timber published Macro Photography for Gardeners and Nature Lovers in 2008, I knew that I wanted to teach myself to be a better photographer. I bought myself a nice Digital SLR camera, and have been playing around with it with mixed results. I’m still learning the ins and outs of shutter speed and aperture, and am realizing that I should probably experiment with lenses beyond the ones that came with the camera when I bought it.

I couldn’t have been more excited when the first of six podcasts that Alan Detrick did with Timber covered just that—lenses! He gave me some good suggestions on what to look out for in terms of price, lens quality, and how to get the family to help pay for them.

If you are looking for some pointers to help you take the most beautiful shots possible, listen to the Timber Press Podcast for the next six weeks. Alan covers everything a beginner like myself could hope to learn: equipment, lighting, how to handle windy photo shoots, how to find the best composition, and even how to photograph insects.

As spring beings to creep into the Northern hemisphere, any number of you will want to go out and take pictures of all the beauty. To support your efforts, Timber Press is hosting a blog/Twitter giveaway during the course of Alan’s podcasts. All you have to do is show us your favorite macro photograph.  You can email us (web@timberpress.com), or you can leave a link to one of your photos in the comments to this blog or on our Twitter feed.  (If you don’t already follow us on Twitter, please do!) We’ll post the photos we receive on our Flickr page as inspiration (with permission from the photographer.)

We are giving away three copies of Macro Photography for Gardeners and Nature Lovers . Winners will be chosen from the comments, photos, and tweets on March 8th.

Take out your camera, send us your own shots, and have fun!

This guest post was written by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth, authors of What’s Wrong with My Plant?, and originally appeared on their blog.

Well, we did it! Last week we held the first event of our book tour with a talk at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show. There may be no better place to get inspired for the road ahead.

Display gardens at big shows always have an idea or two that can be incorporated into small gardens and home landscaping. Vendors always have enough stuff to sink several container ships, yet they also make attractive displays, offering useful tools, lovely plants, and often, solid information. We visited with the folks at Seattle Tilth and the Northwest Horticultural Society. We admired some of the new, more ergonomic pruning and digging tools.

We particularly appreciated the well-executed designs of two displays: “A Family’s Little Farm in the City,” designed by Jessica and Noah Bloom (N.W. Bloom and Seattle Tilth collaborated on the installation); and “Crops for Clunkers,” designed by Colin McCrate, Brad Halm, and Noel Stout of the Seattle Urban Farm Company.

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Portland in January can be pretty drab and dreary. The grey of the bare branches matches the grey of the ever present clouds, which match the grey of the pavement (often muddied and puddled by the grey rain). Even the numerous conifers take on a charcoal cast. With spring (and color!) several months out, I was ecstatic to receive an advance copy of Tom Fischer’s The Gardener’s Color Palette.

Every chapter represents a specific color (or color range), and each page profiles a different bright flower popping off the page. In these dreary Portland weeks it makes me think that maybe spring isn’t too far away.

Though I’ve always considered myself to be a green and yellow type of gal (both are represented in the book), I find myself constantly pulled back to the chapter on orange. There’s something about the soft peach of the Tulipa ‘Dordogne’ and the brighter tropical orange of the Fritillaria imperialis that makes me wonder how I can incorporate them into my garden this spring (or fall as is the case with planting tulip bulbs).

Fritillaria imperialis

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Growing up, we were considered to be the country mice of the extended family as we lived on a one acre plot about 45 minutes from the “big city.” All of my cousins, aunts, and uncles lived on medium sized suburban city lots, and it was just understood that we lived in the wild, though my family religiously mowed the lawn at least once a week spring through fall.

Our huge expanse of a front yard was mostly lawn, as was our back yard, and even though we had fir, cedar, and fruit trees placed sporadically about, our street was about as suburban as you can get in the middle of the country.

It wasn’t until I moved to a small suburban apartment complex with an almost perfectly manicured lawn and grounds that I began to realize the similarities between the two places and started wondering what truly is wild.

In comes William Robinson — with Rick Darke — and The Wild Garden. William Robinson pioneered the naturalistic gardening style in Britain (home of the perfectly manicured lawn and sculpted boxwoods), and his style continues to influence gardeners across the globe today.

Timber author Rick Darke updated Robinson’s classic with gorgeous new photography, and some introductory chapters, and he has recently written an article for The American Gardener magazine that describes exactly “What is Wild?” (Link goes to a PDF.)

William Robinson and Rick Darke have shown me that you don’t have to live in the country to have a naturalistic, “wild” space.

While doing a little fact-checking for our forthcoming book on West Coast Artisan cheese, I came upon this succinct entry on Wikipedia:

“Brevibacterium linens is ubiquitously present on the human skin, where it causes foot odor. The same bacterium is also employed to ferment several cheeses such as Limburger and Port-du-Salut.”

Though I found the entry’s bluntness to be rather unappetizing, I also found it quite intriguing that those stinky feet/cheese comparisons really do have scientific backing (at least according to Wikipedia).

Even more intriguing, though, was my recent sampling of Cowgirl Creamery’s Red Hawk (a luscious, triple cream cheese washed with Brevibacterium linens) which was delicious in every way that foot odor is not.

This guest post was written by Dave DeWitt, author of The Complete Chile Pepper Book.

Because I was in the radio business for twelve years (mostly working my way through college and graduate school), it’s only natural that I should turn to radio to promote my new Timber Press book.  This past September I was in Houston selling The Complete Chile Pepper Book at the Houston Hot Sauce Festival and my buddy James Beck arranged for me to be on Randy Lemmon’s GardenLine show on KTRH, the radio talk mega-station.  Randy, who grew up in El Paso, is a chilehead with a degree in horticultural science, so we got along great.  The call-in questions were much better than average on such a show, proving that his audience is mainly educated and devoted gardeners.

Yesterday, I made a radio appearance with my friend of twenty years, T.J. Trout on 94-Rock in Albuquerque.  T.J., a “shock jock,” is a devoted gardener who grows his own grapes and makes an excellent wine from them.  He also has the top-rated morning show in New Mexico, and since 94-Rock is one of the sponsors of my National Fiery Foods and Barbecue Show, I make regular appearances on the Morning Show.  My personality completely changes on the show and I revert to my old radio persona and make outrageous comments and puns, and T.J. is always threatening to throw me bodily out of the studio.  In this case we were broadcasting from Jim White’s Cafe as a benefit for The Storehouse, which provides clothes and food to the needy.  Last year, I persuaded another show sponsor, Pace Foods, to donate 2,000 jars of their new salsas to The Storehouse.  I still love doing radio — it’s almost as much fun as gardening!

Friday’s post brought you some staff favorites. But wait! There’s more! More staff, and more favorites!

“Bringing Nature Home by Douglas Tallamy. I love that his central message is so simple and yet so full of hope.  Everyone can help improve the world by the humble act of planting native plants. This book made me pay much closer attention to the insects and animals in my garden, and ponder what I could do to make them all happier and improve the biodiversity of my own backyard. A book that has the power to change the way I do things is a powerful book indeed.” (Chani, Marketing)

“My backyard just turned 1 ½ (granted, it has belonged to the earth much longer than that). In the ongoing evolution of converting yard to garden, I have relied on my heavily post-it’ed copy of Perennial Companions. The author — our very own Tom Fischer — packs in gorgeous combinations for every season. I’m drooling over Japanese Blood Grass + Feathertop for autumn (sigh…). I feel inspired every time I pick it up. The only problem: So many combinations, so little space. Maybe the neighbors won’t mind if I “borrow” their front yard?” (Dorothy, Sales)

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Timber Press has about 335 books currently in print. If you divide the number of books by the number of employees currently working for Timber, you get 13.4 books per employee.  (If you are a lucky employee, your 4/10ths of a book has pretty pictures in it.)

Reading employee reviews of all 335 of our books could get pretty tedious, though — so we asked everyone to just pick their favorite, and submit it to the blog.

The following books have been approved by Real People. Consider giving them as gifts to the Real People in your life.

“I love The American Meadow Garden by John Greenlee and Saxon Holt. I love the exquisite photographs, the heavy importance of the book (both in pounds and in subject matter), and the way it fills me with hope.  I think everyone needs to read this book!” (Jessica, Publicity Assistant)

“I don’t even know what is planted in my yard, so figuring out what is wrong with the unknown plants sounds virtually impossible. But it’s not, and that’s why What’s Wrong With My Plant? (And How Do I Fix It?) by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth is the perfect holiday gift for the non-gardener in your life. A gardening book that only expects you to recognize the shape of a leaf before making a diagnosis? Sign me up!” (Kathryn, Marketing and Sales)

“The New Low-Maintenance Garden by Valerie Easton and Jacqueline Knox. This book is a favorite of mine because it provides ideas and inspiration as I look ahead to creating my first garden. I especially love the bulleted lists full of practical suggestions to keep my garden maintenance to a minimum.” (Olivia, Publicist)

“The Family Kitchen Garden by Karen Liebreich, Jutta Wagner, and Annette Wendland. I love the beautiful photos and as a novice edible gardener, I love the month-by-month calendar to keep me on track!” (Juree, Acquiring Editor)

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