(Timber Press, 2016)

This excellent field guide to New England’s wildflowers includes more than 900 species that you may see driving down a road or hiking in the woods. It answers the question, “What’s this plant?” Use it to identify the flowers you enjoy on morning walks and the plants that pop up from bird droppings in your garden. Wildflowers of New England can help you decide which visiting plants to keep in the garden and which to remove.

(Harper Collins Publishers, 2015)

Tim Neve wants you to have fun decorating your home. As the title suggests, Sand Castles, the first interior design book by the editor of Australian Coastal Home magazine, suggests that coastal design should be as fun, impermanent, and inspired by your surroundings as making sand castles on the beach. Known for his love of neutrals and textures, Neve says that coastal interiors should reflect the easy, carefree aesthetic of the seaside.

(Pavilion, 2015)

If you like your kitchen aesthetic to wander further afield than granite countertops and white cabinets, My Cool Kitchen will satisfy your every creative need. Author Jane Field-Lewis adds a fourth book to her exploration of “cool” dwellings, covering more than 30 kitchens crisscrossing from Los Angeles to New Zealand to Copenhagen.

(Timber Press, 2013)

If you crave some winter color or are simply looking forward to summer planting, consider adding some succulents to your life. Once you get started, they are so easy to propagate that it may be hard to stop collecting. Succulent expert Debra Lee Baldwin offers an excellent guide to the geometric plants with her latest book, Succulents Simplified.

(Braided Worlds Publishing, 2014)

For readers open to expanding their creative side or developing a more rounded view of gardening, the 10th anniversary edition of Fran Sorin’s Digging Deep provides a definitive resource. A garden is for her not a space to be designed by someone else or done purely for aesthetic reasons but a place to let imagination flourish.

(Maine Women Write, 2015)

A Gateless Garden is a gem of a book. The layout is simple—each spread contains a full-page, black-and-white photograph by Maine photographer Kerry Michaels, a frequent contributor to Coastal Home, and a short quotation chosen by Liza Bakewell, executive director of Maine Women Write and former anthropology professor at Brown University. For inclusion, the writer must at some point have lived and written in Maine and felt its influence in her work.

Beautiful, long-lasting gardens can be created almost exclusively with well-chosen, artfully arranged shrubs: that is the premise of The Creative Shrub Garden, written by award-winning British designer Andy McIndoe. Aiming for year-round interest, his planting schemes rely not so much on flowers as on form and foliage for their varied effects.

(Skyhorse Publishing, 2013)

The art of fairy gardening rises to a new level with Fairy Gardening: Creating Your Own Magical Miniature Garden, a captivating book by co-authors Julie Bawden-Davis and Beverly Turner.

If you watch Extra Virgin on the Cooking Channel, you know how passionate Gabriele Corcos, a Tuscan native, and Debi Mazar, his wife and a noted actor, are about sharing la dolce vita.

Like their show, their cookbook inspires with Tuscan ingredients and style. Corcos writes, “Our food is rustic, but in its own way supremely delicate.”

The way petals glint in the morning sun. The threads a spider strings up in the corner of your garden. Dewdrops, pollen dust, and shadows.

Alma Whittaker, heroine of Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, learns, loves, suffers, and thrives in the course of her long life, which forms the essence of this novel.

(Union Park Press, 2011)

Peer through the rippled panes of an old home, and you peer through years of history. Antique homes are our windows to the past. As Mark Twain said, “To us, our house was not unsentient matter—it had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with…” New England’s Historic Homes and Gardens by Kim Knox Beckius welcomes us into 36 of the region’s finest historic properties, each carefully selected for its historical significance, visual appeal, and exceptional story.

Planting: A New Perspective is an exciting and comprehensive book that delivers what it promises in the title and much more.

Hungry? Look no farther than your own backyard.

(Stackpole Books, 2013)