A Year of Garden-Inspired Living: Season by Season

Garden designer Vater (The Elegant and Edible Garden) offers an overly broad range of suggestions for bringing beauty into one’s home and community. Divided by the four seasons, each section contains a series of vignettes about small projects or practices, like setting up a hot beverage station in the kitchen during winter, hanging flower bouquets on neighbors’ doors in spring, keeping Popsicles on hand for neighborhood kids in the summer, and marking the start of fall by serving soup around a fire. Many of the activities can be done in any season, like the recommendation to organize books on a shelf by color or give a picnic basket for a wedding gift. Simple, colorful sketches accompany each ritual. While the projects are often sweet and easy to execute, Vater’s goal—“to capture some of the small but important moments of beauty, fun, thoughtfulness, charm, and creative imagination”—lacks specificity, and many of the suggestions feel random, like the tip to motivate oneself to tackle neglected chores by setting a timer or the idea to buy a new hat to boost one’s mood. The result is a well-intentioned but scattershot resource. (Oct.)