Martha Stewart’s new gardening book Martha Stewart’s Gardening Handbook: The Essential Guide to Designing, Planting, and Growing is everything you would expect. It’s comprehensive and beautiful, and its aesthetic leans toward perfectionism. 

Photography courtesy of Martha Stewart’s Gardening Handbook.

What is surprising is that Stewart, a lifelong gardener, waited so long to release another gardening book. Stewart has published an astonishing 100 books over the course of her career (this latest is her 101st). Her first gardening tome was 1991’s comprehensive Martha Stewart’s Gardening: Month by Month. She later published two slim volumes that were more like handbooks: Gardening from Seed in 1999, quickly followed by Gardening 101: Learn How to Plan, Plant, and Maintain a Garden in 2000. Most recently, she penned Martha’s Flowers in 2018, which is both a gardening and floral arranging book with an emphasis on cut flowers. 

This new book makes up for lost time. At 368 pages, it is a hefty doorstop of a reference book, but Stewart being Stewart, it is also pretty—very pretty. The book has a charming cover that depicts a traditional boxwood-edged garden. Inside it is full of both instructive photography and atmospheric garden shots.

Stewart covers all the basics that any beginner gardener would need to start planting—from growing vegetables to pruning shrubs—but she also goes deep on niche topics (climbing hydrangeas, heirloom tomatoes, for example). Throughout, she offers the kind of insightful advice that comes from decades of gardening. Like the beloved magazine she used to publish (RIP), the book is a mix of truly useful DIY info, like a step-by-step guide for how to properly plant a tree, juxtaposed with purely (and wildly) aspirational glimpses of Stewart’s own gardens, like a grove of 300(!) Japanese maples she has collected. 

Refreshingly, Stewart remains unapologetic about the ambition of her gardens, for example the chapter on fruit trees begins, “If you are willing to commit to a long-term, larger-scale, higher-maintenance endeavor…” 

The book also feels of-the-moment in its attention to what may be new and evolving interests for Stewart and her fans. For example, there’s a section on habitat gardening, including a chart of pollinators and their favorite plants, and another on xeric gardens. 

The most seasoned gardeners might skip this latest gardening book unless they are avid fans of Stewart, but we suspect any beginner or mid-level gardener would be delighted to add it to their library. Stewart’s new book is one to shelve next to your trusty Reader’s Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening, but it’s also pretty enough to leave out on the coffee table. 

See also:

• 11 Garden Ideas to Steal from Martha Stewart
• Scandinavia’s Martha Stewart: A Garden Visit with Claus Dalby in Denmark
• Required Reading:’Your Natural Garden’ by Kelly D. Norris