Slow Gardening

Doing something slowly means savoring what you do. However, in just a few generations, we've gone from eating mostly home-cooked food and gardening with mostly local resources to a fast-food culture and cookie-cutter "mow-and-blow" landscapes filled with unproductive and high-maintenance plants from afar. Sure, we've shed a lot of the menial labor it takes to put both food on the table and flowers in the garden, but at what cost to the Earth, and our own bodies?

Slow Gardening to the rescue! The name was inspired by Slow Food, an international movement that promotes local food systems and biological and cultural diversity. In much the same way, a slow-gardening approach can help us all appreciate and enjoy our gardens more, year in and year out.

Slow doesn't mean simple or lazy. In fact, it can actually involve more work, just spread out over time, and in a leisurely fashion. Well-known Southern gardener Felder Rushing offers a commonsense, friendly, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other approach that will appeal to gardeners no matter where they live. Slow Gardening is more than a bunch of tips for easy gardening; it's more about thinking "long haul" and "taking it easy." Life has lots of pressures-why include them in the garden?

About the Author:

Felder Rushing is a tenth-generation American gardener, raised into his teen years under the apprenticeship of a horticulturist great-grandmother who grew flowers, vegetables, herbs, and fruits without a hose or pesticides, and a garden club grandmother who garnered hundreds of blue ribbons for her plant breeding and displays. He is a longtime national director of the Garden Writers Association, member of the National Youth Gardening Committee, past president of several horticulture societies, and board member of the American Horticultural Society. He delivers more than eighty lectures each year and is the author of several books including Passalong Plants, Tough Plants for Southern Gardens, and Gardening Southern Style.