Depending on where you live, you might already have dirt under your fingernails, or that average last frost date may still be weeks away. You may have a self-sufficient homestead or no more than a windowsill to plant in. But as the days get longer and weather warms up, spring gets everyone in a gardening mood. No matter what your gardening conditions are, this crop of books — including some outstanding recent additions — will help you get ready for your gardening season.

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The Climate Change Garden, Updated Edition: Down to Earth Advice for Growing a Resilient Garden

by Sally Morgan and Kim Stoddart

Based on the unpleasant fact that “It’s no longer gardening as usual,” this recent book addresses how heat waves, droughts, flooding, and violent storms are reshaping what works in our gardens. Botanist Sally Morgan and climate-gardening writer Kim Stoddart deliver the first comprehensive guide to adapting your garden for a warming world — covering everything from plant selection and soil management to water harvesting and microclimate creation. Niki Jabbour, author of The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener, calls it “the in-depth guide you need to learn how to manage climate extremes and build resilient gardens.” Whether you’re coping with earlier springs, unpredictable rainfall, or shifting pest pressure, this book provides practical, season-by-season strategies for building resilience into any garden.

The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans

by Patricia Klindienst

Gardens are about much more than plants. Interested in the connection between food and a sense of place, Klindienst bypasses the celebrity garden designers to feature the stories of urban, suburban, and rural gardens created by Native Americans, Hispanics, and immigrants from across Asia and Europe. Blending history and observation, she presents a model of sustainability that embraces not only ecology but culture.

A Flower Garden for Pollinators

by Rachel de Thame

Named one of Gardens Illustrated’s top gardening books of 2024, this gorgeous guide from the beloved Gardeners’ World presenter makes the case that gardens can be both beautiful and wildlife-friendly. Arranged by season and illustrated with beautiful hand-painted watercolors and alongside glorious photography, the book walks gardeners through what to plant and when to sustain pollinators year-round. Plant Life called it “a timely guide for those of us who want to attract more pollinators into our gardens,” and The English Garden noted it shows how to include a dedicated pollinator area “in a beautiful, productive way, whatever the space.” Garden blogger Bramble Garden wrote that if there were a vote for the most beautiful gardening book of 2024, de Thame would win it.

The Flowerpot Forager

by Stuart Ovenden

Not everyone has easy access to wild areas where they can forage foods like wild garlic and pink clover. “The Flowerpot Forager” describes 30 wild edible plants that can be grown at home, with simple recipes on how to use them.

The Herb Gardening Handbook

by Andrew Perry

Subtitled, “A Beginners’ Guide to Growing and Harvesting Herbs No Matter Your Space,” this book provides a simple growing guide for common herbs along with instructions for 12 herb-growing projects utilizing spaces from windowsills to gardens. Readers will learn how to use herbs in cocktails, grow their own pizza toppings, and even make a positive environmental impact by providing forage for bees.

How to Grow the Flowers

by Marianne Mogendorff and Camila Romain

Cutting gardens don’t always get respect, but being sustainability-minded doesn’t mean you can only grow practical vegetables. Subtitled, “A sustainable approach to enjoying flowers through the seasons,” this book helps gardeners grow the crop that feeds the soul, using the principles of provenance, locality, and climate to produce healthy, chemical-free bouquets.

The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Diversity in the Home Garden

by Rick Darke and Douglas Tallamy

Most of us want a sustainable garden, but few really want to give up backyard barbecues and games of catch on the lawn in favor of living inside a nature preserve. The Living Landscape is a garden design book that seeks to inform gardeners how to create a beautiful, sustainable space that still functions as a yard families can enjoy.

Native Plant Gardening for Beginners

by Haeley Giambalvo

Serious native plant gardeners need books that are specific to their regions. But beginners need to start with the basics. Giambalvo’s book will help you understand why native plants are so beneficial, how they can make gardening easier and more rewarding, and help you gradually convert your yard to natives, or just make natives a part of your existing plan.

One Garden Against the World: In Search of Hope in a Changing Climate

by Kate Bradbury

Winner of the People’s Book Prize for Non-Fiction and longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing, this 2024 memoir from BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine wildlife editor Kate Bradbury is part nature diary, part climate call to action. Through a year in her small urban garden near Brighton, which is home to hedgehogs, mason bees, dragonflies, and an astonishing frog population, Bradbury shows how even tiny spaces can become vital wildlife habitats. For anyone struggling with eco-anxiety, it’s both a practical guide to wildlife gardening and a reminder that individual action in our gardens still matters.

Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes

by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West

Although it’s important to conserve nature as much as possible, truly untouched environments may not really exist. More importantly, people need to learn to appreciate the elements of nature that can be cultivated in disturbed, urban environments. This book, described as a post-wild manifesto, provides a practical guide to layer plants in communities to reflect natural systems while thriving in the built world.

Rebel Gardening

by Alessandro Vitale

If you’ve ever wanted to garden but felt like it was the domain of elderly ladies in the countryside, this is the book for you. Italian tattoo artist Alessandro Vitale made a name for himself as Spicy Moustache on YouTube, where he shares his sustainable urban gardening adventures in London. In “Rebel Gardening,” he provides a beginner’s guide to connecting with nature by growing organic food sustainably and with joy.

Small Space Revolution: Planting Seeds of Change in Your Community

by Tayshan Hayden-Smith

Born out of the community healing that followed London’s Grenfell Tower tragedy, this 2024 guide from gardener and activist Tayshan Hayden-Smith demonstrates 20 practical projects for transforming even the tiniest outdoor spaces into thriving green sanctuaries. He emphasizes recycling and reusing materials, from repurposing plastic bottles into greenhouses to turning tin cans into pollinator walls. HortWeek’s review called the book “long overdue,” and it was named a 2024 Staff Nonfiction Favorite on Goodreads. It’s an ideal read for urban gardeners, community organizers, and anyone who wants to green their corner of the world on a tight budget.

You Grow, Gurl! Plant Kween’s Lush Guide to Growing Your Garden

by Christopher Griffin

No matter how much you want to go outside, many apartment dwellers don’t even have a windowsill they’re allowed to stick a planter on. For those urbanites, this book from Christopher Griffin, aka Plant Kween, provides houseplant guidance. Although the Insta-famous Black, non-binary author grows more than 200 plants in their Brooklyn apartment, the book is focused on providing the best care you can for each plant you parent – and for yourself.

Your Natural Garden: A Practical Guide to Caring for an Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden

by Kelly D. Norris
This follow-up to Norris’s award-winning New Naturalism tackles the question every ecological gardener eventually faces: once you’ve planted a naturalistic garden, how do you actually care for it? Organized around the concepts of Place, Complexity, Legibility, and Flow, the book teaches readers to work with natural processes rather than fighting them. This is a great readhy for anyone transitioning from traditional landscaping to native and natural plantings, an increasingly popular move as gardeners reckon with climate reality.

What Grows Together: Fail-safe Plant Combinations For Every Garden

by Jamie Butterworth

Plantsman and designer Jamie Butterworth took inspiration from Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients cookbook to create something genuinely novel: planting “recipes” that simplify the often-intimidating process of choosing what to grow next to what. Named one of Gardens Illustrated’s top books for 2025, the book helps gardeners maximize time, space, and money by selecting beautiful plants that will thrive together in specific conditions. It’s particularly useful for beginners who want results without a design degree.

Editor’s Note: Originally published on March 28, 2023, this article was substantially updated with new books in February 2026.

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Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click to get a larger image.

This week’s quote is from Hal Harvey, author of Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low Carbon Energy, who has confidence we can start the post-carbon turn if we act decisively now. He wrote, “A dozen highly effective policies in the biggest countries can put us on the right path.” It’s advice that’s more relevant than ever in the era of attacks on climate policy.

This poster was originally published on August 2, 2019.

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Editor’s Note: We invite artists and reuse enthusiasts to share their stories about growing a sustainable movement or small business while making a positive difference for the planet. The beautiful work in this article was created by Simone Cabral.

I’m an artist based in Bloomington, IN, and I give discarded aluminum coffee pods a second life by transforming them into handmade jewelry and small art pieces.

Each piece begins with used coffee pods collected from my community, materials that were never meant to last beyond a single use. Before any design work begins, the pods must be cleaned, sanitized, flattened, cut, folded, and shaped entirely by hand. They arrive dented, stained, and inconsistent, carrying the marks of their previous life. Learning how to work with those imperfections, rather than erasing them, was one of my first challenges.

Coffee pods are lightweight but sharp, fragile but stubborn. Early on, I spent a lot of time testing how the aluminum responds to pressure, movement, and long-term wear. The goal was never just to reuse the material, but to do so responsibly, creating pieces that are comfortable, durable, and meant to be worn often, not treated as fragile statements.

Crafting, Learning, and Building Trust

I’ve been intentionally learning and practicing upcycling since 2021, combining hands-on experimentation with my professional background as a technician in environmental sanitation. Along the way, I also received training with a Brazilian jewelry designer, which helped me refine my techniques, understand balance and movement, and translate raw, unconventional materials into intentional, wearable forms.

One ongoing challenge in working with reused materials is building credibility and helping people understand the value of the work. Because the material itself is familiar and often associated with waste, some people initially struggle to separate its origin from the skill, time, and knowledge required to transform it. I’ve learned that transparency is key. When people see the process, understand the training involved, and experience the finished piece firsthand, the conversation shifts from “What is this made from?” to “How was this made?”

While I’ve seen coffee pods reused by other artists online, since I started repurposing them, I haven’t encountered others working with this material at the in-person art fairs I’ve attended.

Story, Place, and the Human Side of Sustainability

Nature and place play a central role in my work. I draw inspiration from the northeast of Brazil, where I was born, and from Indiana, the place I now call home. These landscapes, one coastal and vibrant, the other grounded and quiet, influence the shapes, textures, and rhythm of my designs. The material may be industrial, but the inspiration is deeply organic.

Over time, I’ve learned that people connect most strongly to reuse through story and touch. Jewelry offers a unique entry point into conversations about sustainability. It’s personal and worn close to the body. When people learn where the material came from and how much time and intention went into transforming it, they begin to see waste not as an endpoint, but as something in transition.

I reach people primarily through in-person experiences at art fairs, workshops, and local retail spaces, where dialogue happens naturally. Sharing the full process, including the slow and often unglamorous steps, helps demystify reuse. Sustainability isn’t effortless, but it can be thoughtful, creative, and accessible.

What began as a small experiment at home has grown into a mindful, independent practice rooted in reuse, intention, and storytelling. When someone wears one of my pieces, they’re not just wearing jewelry. They’re engaging with a question: What if everyday materials still have something to offer?

My tagline is simple: Wear the change you want to see.

For me, that change starts small, with attention, care, and a willingness to look at waste differently.

About the Author

Simone Cabral is the founder of and artist behind By Soul & Hands. From the first sketch to the final package, Simone brings each creation to life through her own two hands — designing, crafting, and fulfilling every order with care.

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