Gardener's Latin: A Lexicon

Description

For more than a decade, gardeners have been turning to a beautiful little hardcover book called Gardener's Latin, by Bill Neal. Neal understood that as Latin terms began appearing with increasing frequency on nursery tags and gardening catalogs, gardeners would need help. So he weeded through the Latin words that describe and distinguish among plants and flowers and compiled a volume of select, brief, clear definitions.Gardener's Latin leads us down the path from abbreviatus to zonatus, turning aside here and there along the way for little-known horticultural facts and fables and the wisdom of gardeners from Virgil to Vita Sackville-West.

Barbara Damrosch is one of the nation's most respected garden experts and writers. She is the author of Theme Gardens and The Garden Primer and writes a weekly column for The Washington Post called "A Cook's Garden." She appeared as a regular correspondent on the PBS series The Victory Garden, and co-hosted the series Gardening Naturally for The Learning Channel. She is the co-owner, with her husband, Eliot Coleman, of Four Season Farm, an experimental market garden in Harborside, Maine, that is a nationally recognized model of small-scale sustainable agriculture. Bill Neal (1951-1991) was widely admired as a chef and the author of four cookbooks, among them the classic Bill Neal's Southern Cooking.

"Botanical Latin either intrigues or intimidates. To the rescue, whatever your bias, is Bill Neal's nifty little volume."