"A Way to Garden prods us toward that ineffable place where we feel we belong; it's a guide to living both in and out of the garden." -The New York Times Book Review For Margaret Roach, gardening is more than a hobby, it's a calling. Her unique approach, which she calls "horticultural how-to and woo-woo," is a blend of vital information you need to memorize and intuitive steps you must simply feel and surrender to. In A Way to Garden, Roach imparts decades of garden wisdom on seasonal gardening, ornamental plants, vegetable gardening, design, gardening for wildlife, organic practices, and much more. She also challenges gardeners to think beyond their garden borders and to consider the ways gardening can enrich the world. Brimming with beautiful photographs of Roach's own garden, A Way to Garden is practical, inspiring, and a must-have for every passionate gardener. In this lushly-photographed book, iconic garden voice Margaret Roach shows gardeners how to incorporate lessons from her glorious garden into their own home landscapes. Margaret Roach, one of America's best-known garden writers, creates awaytogarden.com and the public radio show by the same name, which has been called a "top-5 garden podcast" by The Guardian and is the winner of multiple Garden Writers of America medals. She was the first garden editor of Martha Stewart Living magazine where she also co-hosted a weekly call-in radio show for several years. She lives in rural New York State, and her garden has been open for Garden Conservancy Open Days for more than 20 years. Preface My how times have changed. Though at first thought, the idea of rekindling a 21-year-old garden book might not seem like a task as radical or needed as, say, redoing one of the same vintage about computers, it turns out otherwise. Yes, we still use shovels (if not Word 6.0; I'm now pecking away on version 16.16.2). Yes, the horticultural operating system still begins with "green side up," though I did recently gift a friend some paperwhite narcissus to force, forgetting to state what seemed to me the obvious. I got a call a few weeks later asking why white spaghetti was sprouting from the pot. And one more yes, before we get to all the nos. Were they alive, my money's on the likelihood that Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein would still be discussing the most perennial of evergreen garden topics: The story goes that Toklas once asked Stein what she saw when she closed her eyes. "Weeds," Stein replied. Me, too; now and forever, I forecast that the gardener shall forevermore have plants growing in the wrong place, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Help! Much else has been upended, I came to realize as I dug in to revise the book. No, mere updates would not do, Margaret. The catalog sources at the back of the first edition are now mostly fond memories of old friends long gone from the business. (Their progeny live on in my garden, and I still unearth the occasional old plastic label, the printing so faded as to be nearly illegible.) Some "it" plants of that moment that everyone grew (or wanted to, if only they could secure a piece) are now known thugs, and I, like gardeners everywhere, will spend the rest of my days hoicking them out, sometimes losing the battle. Their tenacity is an in-our-faces, perennial reminder of inadvertent environmental wrongdoing-of cultivating what proved to become invasives. Plants that were rare-a dramatic variegated- or gold-leaf version some savvy gardener identified from a sport, perhaps-stayed that way a relatively long while. The ramp up to wider distribution was once upon a time dictated by the math of the plant's inclination to set seed or provide ample divisions or cuttings. As tissue culture laboratories have proliferated, and the secrets of micropropagation, or cloning, for more species

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