Book Review: Taming Wildflowers – The Native Plant Gardener

By Miriam Goldberger

Publisher: ‎St. Lynn’s Press, 2014
Paperback‏:‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10: ‏0985562269
Dimensions: 8.5” X 8.5”
Price: $25.99 (Indigo.ca); $18.89 (Amazon.com) – hardcover

Note: This review is adapted from the one I posted to Amazon after purchasing the book in 2020.

There are a lot of things to like about this award winning book (The Garden Writers Association Silver Award of Achievement). The book seems to be geared primarily to introducing new gardeners to the joy of growing “wildflowers”, but it can be confusing in places for the newbie. I’ll start with what I like about it, and wrap up with the flaws, as I see them. (I will say up front that, after publishing my own book on the topic, I now have a greater appreciation for what it takes to put a book like this together – including the challenges of working with a publisher and an editor.)

First off, the pictures, for the most part, are fabulous. Not only does Goldberger have clear pictures of the flower, but also shows a picture of what the baby plant looks like. Although not really necessary for a new gardener, once your garden is established this will really help you figure out which emerging plants in the spring are weeds, and which are supposed to be there.

She also goes into fairly good detail in the front of the book on the importance of “wildflowers” (I will explain later why I continue to put this word in quotation marks) with a discussion about pollinators, birds and the connection to our own health. (On this subject – the best book I have read to date is Doug Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home).

Each flower has its own page – there are 60 of her favourite “wildflowers” (which includes some grasses) – with excellent descriptions on height, colour, light, soil and moisture needs, a germination code for when you want to start your own from seed, and some of its key strengths and weaknesses (e.g. deer resistance, suitability for containers, salt tolerance, edibility, etc.) And finally it indicates which states and provinces the plant is native to (more on this later, too).

I originally thought I liked that she has arranged the plants based on the season they come into bloom – spring, late spring-early summer, summer, and fall – but that makes it a bit more challenging to go directly to a plant’s page in the book if you are unsure of its flowering time. At the end of the book there are great instructions, based on years of her own experience, for starting your own plants from seed, on ecosystem gardening, on composting, and more. She concludes the book with a two-page spread indicating which are the best wildflowers to grow, based on your soil type. All in all, this is a wonderful, fact and picture filled book that would be a great addition to any gardener’s library.

Despite all these great things, I was bothered by the fact that Goldberger has a very loose definition of a wildflower. At one point, she equates wildflowers with native plants, but I don’t believe that is what most people think of when they hear the term. She even talks about her first attempt to plant a meadow by buying a package of “Northeastern Wildflower Meadow Mix” that was mostly non-native species, and the frustration that resulted. (This is EXACTLY how I got started into native plants, so I can relate.) She also has an entire section, set up in the same format as the native plant descriptions, of 19 non-natives like Chinese basil, scarlet runner beans, Mexican sunflower and zinnias. Not only are these non-natives, but it’s hard to even picture most of them as “wildflowers”.

The second serious issue I have is that the plants are listed in alphabetic order by common name within the respective season of blooming sections. The big issue with this is that common names vary considerably by region. In the book, she calls Asclepias incarnata Red Milkweed. I’ve only ever called it Swamp Milkweed and didn’t know where for look (till I looked in the index). Slightly less annoying (till I learned to consult the index first) is that if you don’t actually know the bloom period for a plant, you can’t easily find it in the book.

After that, my issues with the book get a little bit nit-pickier – listing the state or province the plants are native to is fine when you have small states, but Canadian provinces are HUGE, and plants native to southern Ontario, for instance, may not be (and probably aren’t) native to most of the rest of the province. A native-range map would have been far more helpful in determining if one of these flowers would survive in your garden.

Goldberger also includes a section on cut-flower arrangements and includes a section of photos showing off her arrangements. There is even a section of wedding photos, some of which include images of her bouquets in action. Definitely not something that interested me. This is her business, after all, but it felt more like an advertisement than a book on growing wildflowers.

My overall summary – this is still a great book for a new, or even experienced, gardener who wants to grow more native plants, despite what I see as its flaws. But if you really want to grow native plants – for all their benefits – use this book as a general guide, then check out the web to find out if that plant is actually native where you live or somewhere far away.