The Lavender Garden
Robert Kourik,
Photographs by Deborah Jones
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
1998 Chronicle Books
ISBN: 0811815706

From its botany, cultivation & making fragrances, crafts & cuisine, together with luscious close-up photography, recipes, farm & aromatherapy listings & index, all you'll ever want to know about the lovely scented herb Lavender.

Some of Deborah Jones' photographs are like Impressionistic canvases of fields of Lavender with a table & chairs in the distance beside a summer green tree; another captures a summer moment when a bee is about to alight upon a flower head. This photographer offers up sumptuous landscapes of dreamy hot summer sunscapes & precise up-close portraits of this most attractive of herbs.

Robert Kourik has compiled a solid, interesting & precise text book on how to get started growing Lavender. In a colorful & imaginative way, with elegant fonts & soothing hues this author gives us a superb course on the botany, language, cultivation & processing of Lavandula.

I found the chapter on Choosing a Lavender fascinating - I had not known there were so many different kinds of this plant. The photos in this chapter are very good.

This is definitely a book for giving to everyone you know who loves the Lavender. In the dark days of winter this colorful, sunny book will brighten anybody's heart.

Now, for the one big thing missing with this book! All through it I felt a deprivation until I realized what it was. Lavender is a scented herb - where were the scratch & sniff patches for each species of Lavandula described? The whole crew putting this book together really missed the boat on this - as much as Lavender is lovely to look at it is everso much more a SCENT!
(05/14/00)

Rebecca