Recommended Books by Nancy Sutor

 

 

I.   Gardens as Sites of Resistance, Care, and Political Imagination

These works position gardens as spaces where pleasure, beauty, and care operate as forms of resistance—quiet, sustained, and deeply political. Gardening becomes an ethical practice that counters domination, scarcity thinking, and abstraction through attention to place and lived experience.

Titles:

Orwell’s Roses — Rebecca Solnit

Modern Nature — Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman’s Garden — with photographs by Howard Sooley

My Garden (Book) — Jamaica Kincaid

Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition — Robert Pogue Harrison

 

II.   Indigenous Knowledge, Cultural Memory, and Reciprocal Ecologies

Rooted in Indigenous, diasporic, and culturally specific ways of knowing, these books foreground gardens as repositories of memory, identity, and ethical relationship. Plants are teachers, kin, and carriers of ancestral knowledge, challenging extractive models of land use.

Titles:

Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Earth Knows My Name — Patricia Klindienst

The Sweet Breathing of Plants — edited by Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson

Summoned by the Earth — Cynthia Jurs

 

III.   Plant Intelligence, Forest Networks, and the Unseen World

These works draw on contemporary science to reveal the hidden systems that sustain life—mycorrhizal networks, microbial communities, and plant perception. Together, they dismantle the idea of human exceptionalism and propose intelligence as distributed, relational, and ecological.

Titles:

The Light Eaters — Zoë Schlanger

Finding the Mother Tree — Suzanne Simard

The Hidden Half of Nature — David R. Montgomery & Anne Biklé

 

IV.   Sensory Worlds and the More-Than-Human

Focusing on perception and embodiment, these books invite readers to encounter worlds beyond the human sensorium. They expand ecological awareness by attuning us to the ways animals, plants, and landscapes experience reality.

Titles:

An Immense World — Ed Yong

The Spell of the Sensuous — David Abram

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — Annie Dillard

 

V.    Erotic, Spiritual, and Philosophical Ecologies

These texts explore ecology as an intimate, sensuous, and philosophical encounter. Life is understood as expressive and desiring, with gardens serving as thresholds between matter and meaning, spirit and soil.

Titles:

Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology — Andreas Weber

The Sacred Balance — David Suzuki

The Transformative Vision — José A. Argüelles

 

VI.     Art, Mysticism, and Botanical Consciousness

Situated at the intersection of art, spirituality, and botanical thought, these books explore how plants have shaped human imagination—from ancient cosmologies to contemporary artistic practice. The garden emerges as a symbolic and material site of transformation.

Titles:

On the Necessity of Gardening — edited by Laurie Cluitmans

The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree — edited by Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark

 

VII.     Climate, Resilience, and Gardening for an Uncertain Future

Addressing environmental volatility, these works advocate for adaptive, place-based responses to climate change.

Gardens become laboratories of resilience, creativity, and hope—spaces where beauty and survival intertwine.

Titles:

The Undaunted Garden — Lauren Springer