As I began to annotate the gardening books read in 2017, it was immediately evident I had read a far lower number than the 29 annotated for the 2016 bibliography. I had a long period stretching from February through October when I was so occupied with gardening or traveling or recovering from a case of vertigo that my garden reading was severely curtailed. Nevertheless, I did have a productive reading sprint at the end of the year, and I’m pleased that the books on my list consistently proved to be both enjoyable and informative.
My annotations are far more detailed than they should be, but I’m writing primarily for myself, and in some cases I wanted to retain a robust sampling of what I gathered from a text. I also found myself writing about the reasons why I had read several of the books (evident, for example, in my review of Paul Tukey’s book on lawn care). In my final revisions, I deleted a few of those passages, but this bibliography does slip into a recurrent pattern where the focus is more on the immediate concerns of the gardener than the contents of the book. Because these annotations for 20 books run to almost 20 pages, they are submitted as a separate pdf attachment. ~Bob Marrs