Blooming Bouquets

Combining her lifelong experience as a gardener with her skills as a floral designer, Suzy Bales combines fresh flowers and foliage from the landscape for dozens of enchanting seasonal designs.

Garden Bouquets and Beyond: Creating Wreaths, Garlands and More in Every Garden Season  is an all-encompassing collection of everything gardens and floral—from when to cut and how to arrange to using flowers, leaves and vines in all types of unique decorations and arrangements. Readers will also find complete instructions for prolonging the bloom for arrangements, wreaths and bouquets.

Lessons in Listening

In Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone, Dr. Mark Goulston shares his trusted collection of communication techniques and the secret to their incredible effectiveness.

Just Listen lays out nine basic rules and 12 quick techniques that anyone can use to move tough-to-reach people through what Goulston calls the “Persuasion Cycle.”

Just Listen is a welcome guide not only for anyone who’s struggling to get through to someone, but for everyone whose career, health and happiness depend on getting along with others.

Wildlife Gardening

If you are just learning how to enjoy wildlife in a backyard setting, Texas Wildscapes: Gardening for Wildlife by Kelly Conrad Bender will tell about the kinds of animals to expect when provided with their three basic needs: food, water and shelter. Texas Wildscapes will then coach you in designing and planting a yard or garden to best provide these requirements for the many birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates the yard will attract.

The book and accompanying DVD is a welcome supplement, providing a wealth of plant and animal lists, tables, pictures and other detailed information.

Reliable Roses

In the complete, valuable well-indexed and well-referenced Right Rose, Right Place, Peter Schneider describes more than 350 reliable roses that have proven to be outstanding performers in his Ohio garden.

Deciding where conditions may be very different from where you live, Right Rose, Right Place will help the reader recognize other great ideas in the gardens of your rose-growing neighbors and in nearby arboreta, horticultural parks and botanical gardens.

The book also offers answers to common questions and problems faced in growing roses.

Kids Activities

Sharon Lovejoy’s latest book, Toad Cottages & Shooting Stars: Grandma’s Bag of Tricks, is a magical guide to 130 activities for grandparents, parents, teachers and children of all ages. These imaginative ideas will instill a true sense of wonder as readers learn how to create a pumpkin patch in a pot, make leaf rubbings, turn an aquarium into a worm hotel, create a firefly lantern and much more.

Projects in Toad Cottages & Shooting Stars teach skills like patience and persistence, while exposing readers to the joys of nature, arts and crafts, and healthy and natural foods.

Full Plate

Tired of dieting because of the long list of restricted foods, meetings to attend or expensive elixirs to drink? T he Full Plate Diet: Slim Down, Look Great, Be Healthy by Stuart A. Seale, M.D., Teresa Sherard, M.D., and Diana Fleming, Ph.D., LDN, rests on a single fulcrum —dietary fiber. Fiber is now being rediscovered because of its enormous health benefits. Found in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans and nuts, dietary fiber has few calories and it allows you to fill your plate and stomach while still dropping weight.

The Full Plate Diet plan works because it is simple—eat 40 grams of fiber a day. That’s it—no calorie counting or special foods to prepare.

Japanese Gardens

Almost every Japanese garden is influenced by the tea garden. Marc Peter Keane describes the history, design and aesthetics of tea gardens, from T ’ang China to the present day, with over 100 stunning photographs, architectural floor plans and
illustrations.

The most extensive book on this genre ever published in English, the Japanese Tea Garden is a rich resource for garden lovers, landscape designers and architects—and anyone who admires the striking aesthetic of the Japanese garden.

Scrumptious Sauces

500 Best Sauces, Salad Dressings, Marinades & More is the definitive encyclopedia of all things sauces and dressings. Author George Cleary covers everything from white and red sauces, marinades and rubs, to butters and spreads, and dessert sauces.

Cleary’s easy, homemade sauces and dressings can be whipped up in minutes and “dress up” any meal.