I really, really enjoyed this book. Marta McDowell's exploration of the wild world Laura lived in was excellent. The book focuses a chapter on each of the places Laura called home. As we travel through Laura's life, we get to experience the wide variety of flora and fauna with her. Ms. McDowell quotes liberally from the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, includes lush pictures, and solidly researched information about the plants and wildlife then and now.
The final two chapters are rooted firmly in the present. Visiting Wilder Gardens is chock full of helpful hints to make the most out of a road trip following the Laura Ingalls Wilder trail. Growing a Wilder Garden has a thorough lost of all the plants mentioned in Laura's writings and notations about cultivation at Rocky Ridge Farm. Additionally there are resources provided for heirloom seeds and gardening implements - basically everything you need to grow an authentic pioneer garden.
The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a must read for every fan of the Little House books.

I wanted so badly to read this book but the file Netgalley provided was unreadable. I send it to my Kindle but it was rejected. It was supposed to be a pdf but instead was a random file with a weird extension. Very disappointing!

Growing up, I always wanted to be in Laura's world and this book got me pretty close. It was beautifully done with its images and pages. I was thrilled to read this book and reminisce. It will delight any reader young or old that has a taste for the historic and the west.

I couldnt download this book onto my kindle but have managed to have a look at a friends copy. Fantastic, takes me back to being young and how much i enjoyed watching Little House on the Prairie. Many thanks

Oh my, this is a wonderful book. So much information about plants, the journeys of LIW. I loved reading it and the pictures are superb. The author has done an outstanding job on this book.

It's been a very long time since I've reread Wilder's books or re-watched the television series, but just recently I was able to final fulfill a dream I've had of visiting one of the places that Wilder lived back in her youth, Walnut Grove, MN.
What a buzz I got from just seeing the land and the town that she wrote about all those years ago.

McDowell has done a fantastic job with her book. The illustrations and photographs, along with her text, bring back all the excitement I felt when I first read the books and have built on thrill of visiting Walnut Grove.

If you are a Little House fan this is a must read volume. It will make you fall in love with Wilder all over again!

This book gives an in-depth view of the places that Laura Ingalls Wilder lived during her life. Plants and vegetation grown during her life is better explained. The pictures and illustrations added immensely to the book. The added tidbits of information about Laura and her daughter, Rose is very interesting. Recommended!

Review: The World Of Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Frontier Landscapes That Inspired The Little House Books

On June 8, 2017 by Dawn
The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Frontier Landscapes that Inspired the Little House Books
The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Frontier Landscapes that Inspired the Little House Books by Marta McDowell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To wind up today, im going to hit you with a third, big, beautiful coffee-table book.

It’s 2017, and this year marks the 150th birthday of this most beloved of authors. The Little House On The Prairie series needs no introduction, nor explanation, being at the heart of American literature itself.

In this volume, we explore the trails themselves, the landscape, the history of the world young Laura inhabited. With charming botanical drawings and vivid language. McDowell sets the stage for us in a way Dame Wilder would have never considered necessary… it being unimaginable that her audience would be ignorant of basic farm tools and processes.

Scene by scene and farm by farm, “The World of Laura” draws out the reminders that while fictionalized, Wilder sets her tales in a very real place, a place that has since been painted over by modernity, but still exists in the cracks and corners.

Grab this for the Prairie lovers in your life, and all to the better if there’s interest in gardening, farming, or botanicals.

View all my reviews

This book would be a gardener's delight! I can think of several people I'd share this with. I'm not much of a gardener, but even I enjoyed the expanded history of one of my favorite authors!

As a lover of all things Laura Ingalls Wilder and a gardener, this is a perfect book to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Laura Ingalls birth. I thought that after reading the wonderful Pioneer Girl: the annotated autobiography two years ago that most of what we know about Laura Ingalls Wilder was documented. However Marta McDowell manages to not only bring a wonderful gardening slant to the information we have from the Little House novels as well as LIW's nonfiction and papers but she also gives us new tidbits: Ma & Pa lived near Ma's parents when they were first married and grew hops which were needed by many local breweries. (The one question I wish was answered however was what, if any, effect did the Civil War have on Ma & Pa?).
Most of the book follows the path of the novels, detailing the type of land and therefore the type of farming that the Ingalls as well as the Wilders did on their various farms. Ms. McDowell also intersperses her own family stories when they seem to intersect the experiences of LIW -- apparently husking black walnuts is not an easy thing to do! The author knows her plants and does an excellent job of passing on that knowledge. The last part of the book gives you detailed notes on visiting Wilder gardens as well as lists of plants that are in the novels and/or LIW's papers. This is a book that should go with you if you decide to visit the sites of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

A beautiful companion to the original Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The moment I saw the author of this book, I wanted to read it. I sat down one grey and gloomy day to read McDowell's GARDENING LIFE OF BEATRIX POTTER and was completely immersed in summer, flowers, and the heady scent of the English countryside and the sheep-dotted slopes of the Lake District.

While there have been many books in the last couple of decades written about Laura Ingalls Wilder, this is the only one that addresses not simply events in Laura's life, but the landscapes her family lived in, the wildlife she saw, the plants that grew in the diverse areas in which she lived. Each chapter corresponds with a milestone in the life of a plant, from seed as Laura is born and spends her early years in the Big Woods of Wisconsin (and Almanzo grows up in the cold north of New York), to late harvest as she and husband Almanzo grow old at Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. It is also more generally a history of westward expansion and the flora and fauna found by the settlers when they arrived.

This is a beautiful book, liberally illustrated with color and black-and-white photos of the Ingalls family, illustrations from both Helen Sewell and Garth Williams from the Little House books, botanical prints, maps, and clippings from newspapers, brochures, magazines, etc. that tell the story of the European settling of the Midwest. McDowell's words bring to mind winter chill, summer warmth, birdsong, the sheer awe of the tall prairie grass (don't compare prairie grass to what grows on your front lawn; these are mammoth blades of grass which were higher than a man's head and gave to the bison all the nourishment needed), the scent and sight of fields of wildflowers, the blue sky arching above. For anyone who loves nature, or who wishes to know as closely as possible what Laura experienced in the Wisconsin woods, on the Kansas prairie, in the Iowa groves, and in the hills of Mansfield, Missouri, this is a keeper for certain.

Perfect for a quiet day with cocoa and soft music playing in the background.

An in-depth look into the background of the Little House stories and the lives of the Ingalls/ Wilder families, with a focus on the agricultural details touched on in the books. I found this a fascinating read, as it meticulously follows the timeline of Laura and Almanzo Wilder's lives, including maps of their travels, townships and homesteads over the years. The author has done a lot of research, weaving together parts of the fiction series and Laura's biography, with anecdotes of her own that add color to the story. Beautiful botanical drawings, photographs and other vintage prints throughout make this a quality book to leave out on the coffee table. It would be a nice addition to any library, especially if someone has an interest in history and gardening.
Recommend!

I was a little doubtful when I started this book. I thought it would be a bit boring but I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. The author talks about each of the places Laura and her family lived. She discusses what the landscape was like and the type of vegetation and flowers were around that the Ingalls family would have used to survive. The best part were the text examples taken from the book. I felt like I was re-reading the books again which now I really want to do. There were great photos of the family sprinkled through out the book and information and pictures of all the homesteads they lived on. The author has been to all of them and shares her experiences visiting them. I have been to two sites, South Dakota and Missouri, and would love to visit more, especially Almanzo's childhood home in Malone, New York. If you are a fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder, this is a must read. This book publishes at the end of September.

The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Frontier Landscapes that Inspired the Little House Books by Marta McDowell is a charming book filled with old-fashioned images that include wood cut prints and botanical drawings. Interspersed in her book our the stories of the Ingall's family's travels from the east to the west and the states they lived in. The Ingall's story often mirrored my husband's family's story as his family moved from the east to Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and later the Dakota Territory much like the Ingall's family. Reading this book truly does tell about the history of the American pioneers who moved westward in search of a better life.

McDowell has included a treasure trove of plant and gardening information throughout her book. She teaches about some of the old-fashioned plants not often found in modern times. She also tells about plants still enjoyed today by many Midwesterners. The chokecherry is a good example of a plant used by modern cooks today to make chokecherry jam or syrup.

Recommend.

Review written after downloading a galley from Net Galley.

Loved this book! It brought me back to my childhood and all of my fond memories reading the Little House on the Prairie series. I learned so much about the Wilders and the I wish this book had been around when I was younger! I'd love to try to plant my own Little House garden in honor of one of my favorite book series. The book itself is beautifully arranged and the photographs and illustrations are fantastic. Well done!

Sadly although I have tried different methods, I am unable to download the book, therefore unable to review.
I have read many of Laura Ingalls wilder's books and was looking forward to reading this account of her life.

"The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder" is a companion book to the Little House books. We're told the locations and dates for each book in the series. Going book by book, the author explained things like the history of each location and what was typical for the area at that time. She also gave more detail on the plants and farm work mentioned in the books. There were many pictures and illustrations of the places, tools, and plants. She included maps showing the locations where Laura lived.

Basically, each chapter was a companion to a book or location in the series: Wisconsin Woods ("Little House in the Big Woods"), New York Farm ("Farmer Boy"), Prairie of Kansas ("Little House on the Prairie"), Creekside in Minnesota & Iowa ("On the Banks of Plum Creek"), The Dakota Prairie ("By the Shores of Silver Lake" and "The Long Winter"), Settled Farm & Settled Town ("Little Town on the Prairie" and "These Happy Golden Years"), and Great Plains to Ozark Ridge ("The First Four Years"). The author also covered Laura's life at Rocky Ridge Farm and Rock Home (based on letters, newspapers, and other writings).

She ended by describing the places that a person might enjoy visiting if interested in seeing the places where Laura Wilder lived. She also included a list of plants mentioned in the books for those interested in planting those flowers, trees, etc. The book was a fun, quick read. Overall, I'd recommend this interesting book to fans of the Little House series.

The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder is full of information about Laura's life; her family, the places they lived, and about the flora and fauna in those places. I loved the old photographs and the copies of old advertisements sprinkled throughout this book.

This book tells the story of Laura Ingalls Wilder in such great detail. It's not only a history book, but a botany book, farmers guide, memoir, picture book etc etc. There are so many wonderful aspects of this work. It's interesting not only because I have a greater understanding of Laura as a person but I have a greater understanding of what was like when she lived. All the pictures bring things to life in a new way. I love that pictures that I remember from the Little House books are included. It really ties the reader to the books. Lots of connects were made in my head. I want to go back and reread all the Little House books now after having read this. Beautifully written and presented. Would be a lovely coffee table book!
I received a digital copy of this book from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.