Garden History

French Dirt is a love story between a man and his garden. It's about plowing, planting, watering, and tending. It's about cabbage, tomatoes, parsley, and eggplant. Most of all, it's about the growing friendship between an American outsider and a close-knit community of French farmers.

For the past few years, I’ve been living with a ghost. My husband - my mate - was lost because of choices I made. As one of only a few tyrannosaur shifters on this planet, I have resigned myself to an immortality alone, married to my work. I am more than happy to keep my walls up, heart guarded, and my focus set on my missions. That was until a compassionate, plant obsessed man stomped into my life.

Since its publication in 2003, the first edition of Black Garden has become the definitive study of how Armenia and Azerbaijan, two southern Soviet republics, were pulled into a conflict that helped bring them to independence, spell the end the Soviet Union, and plunge a region of great strategic importance into a decade of turmoil. This important volume is both a careful reconstruction of the history of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict since 1988 and on-the-spot reporting of the convoluted aftermath.

Why Women Grow is a much-needed exploration of why women turn to the earth, as gardeners, growers and custodians. This book emerged from a deeply rooted desire to share the stories of women who are silenced and overlooked. In doing so, Alice fosters connections with gardeners that unfurl into a tender exploration of women's lives, their gardens and what the ground has offered them, with conversations spanning creation and loss, celebration and grief, power, protest, identity and renaissance.

The first edition, published in 2007, won a James Beard Award. Now updated with newly discovered recipes and historical information, this updated edition includes the origins of the first American drink, the mint julep (which Wondrich places before the American Revolution) and those of the cocktail itself. It also provides more detail about 19th-century spirits, many new and colorful anecdotes and details about Thomas' life, and a number of particularly notable, delicious, and influential cocktails not covered in the original edition.

A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers—an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an...

For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. Granulated sugar was first produced in India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way? The World of Sugar begins with the earliest evidence of sugar production.

His winning percentage was well above Jordan’s shooting average or Woods’s domination of golf tournaments. And he sold products and drew spectators like no one had ever done. He was hands down the most famous athlete in America’s most popular spectator sport, and exactly one hundred years ago you would have been hard pressed to find anybody in the country who didn’t know his name. He was Dan Patch, and he was a racehorse.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, Scientific American, and The Economist The riveting, untold true story of the botanists at the world’s first seed bank who made “the mad, heroic decision during the siege of Leningrad to guard biodiversity at the cost of human life” (The New...

The Apple: A Delicious History tells the engrossing and richly informative story of a fruit with a unique attachment to the human story. The 10,000-year tale of the round and pleasantly crunchy products of the trees of the genus Malus embraces not only culinary, horticultural, social and commercial history but also age-old traditions in mythology, folklore and religion.

The way we buy our food today feels so ordinary, so effortless, that it’s easy to forget what an extraordinary invention the supermarket really is. Once upon a time, shopping for essentials meant visiting a half-dozen different shops, waiting for clerks to fetch and weigh each item, and relying on personal relationships with local merchants. Fast-forward to the modern world, and the weekly shop takes place under bright lights in vast aisles stocked with everything imaginable — a world of instant choice, convenience, and abundance.

France is in a rut, and so is French cuisine. Twenty-five years ago it was hard to have a bad meal in France; now, in some cities and towns, it is a challenge to find a good one. For the first time in the annals of modern cooking, the most influential chefs and the most talked-about restaurants in the world are not French. Within France, large segments of the wine industry are in crisis, cherished artisanal cheeses are threatened with extinction, and bistros and brasseries are disappearing at an alarming rate.

For more than two thousand years, tea has awakened, calmed, and connected people across continents and cultures. In A History of Tea, you'll travel with this extraordinary beverage on its global journey—from the tea houses of ancient China and the Zen temples of Japan to the colonial plantations of India and Sri Lanka, and into the teacups of Britain and beyond. Along the way, discover how tea shaped empires, sparked revolutions, and inspired rituals that still endure today.

Hutton has now written a fascinating full biography of Sergeant Reckless, who earned two Purple Hearts for her heroic efforts, among other military decorations. Hutton has spoken with the marines who fought alongside Reckless and tells the complete and captivating tale of how a would-be Korean racehorse became one of the greatest Marine Corps wartime heroes. Sgt. Reckless brings the legend back to life more than half a century later.

The Erstwhile brings readers back to the singular world and mind of B. Catling, continuing the groundbreaking storytelling of his hit The Vorrh. In London and Germany, strange beings are reanimating themselves. They are the Erstwhile, the angels that failed to protect the Tree of Knowledge, and...

The British have a relationship with their food that is unlike that of any other country. Once something that was never discussed in polite company, it is now something with which the nation is obsessed. But are we at last developing a food culture or are we just going through the motions? Eating for England is an entertaining, detailed, and somewhat tongue-in-cheek observation of the British and their food, their cooking, their eating, and how they behave in restaurants.

Patrick E. McGovern takes us on a fascinating journey through time to the dawn of brewing, when our ancestors might well have made a paleo brew of wild fruits, honey, cereals, and botanicals. Early beverage makers must have marveled at the magical process of fermentation. Their amazement grew as they drank the mind-altering drinks, which were to become the medicines, religious symbols, and social lubricants of later cultures.

This is the true story of how organized baseball started, how gambling shaped the game from its earliest days, and how it became our national pastime and our national mirror. Baseball in the Garden of Eden draws on original research to tell how the game evolved from other bat-and-ball games and gradually supplanted them, how the New York game came to dominate other variants, and how gambling and secret professionalism promoted and plagued the game.

The epic climax to B. Catling's beloved Vorrh Trilogy. A Vintage Books Original. In the stunning conclusion to this endlessly imaginative saga, the young Afrikaner socialite Cyrena Lohr is mourning the death of her lover, the cyclops Ishmael, when she rekindles a relationship with famed...

The Devil Wins uncovers the complicated history of lying from the early days of the Catholic Church to the Enlightenment, revealing the diversity of attitudes about lying by considering the question from the perspectives of five representative voices - the Devil, God, theologians, courtiers, and women.