Garden

Great Gifts for Gardeners

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Credit: iStock / AlexandraChess

Looking for a gift to give your favourite gardener? Try these…

  • Groovy galoshes/gumboots and long socks to go with them
  • Half a dozen bags of SeaSoil
  • Good slow-release organic fertilizer for the veggie garden in a fancy tin or container
  • Big rubbery muck buckets in red or green or other bright colours filled with washed seaweed (to go on garden or into compost)
  • Bird feeders, bird seed, bird baths, heating coils for bird baths, bird books! Wild Birds Unlimited on Oak Street in Vancouver is a great source for birder gifts.
  • Garden fountain or other statuary; gardeners love these things but often do not splurge on themselves.
  • Really good hand salve. Lee Valley has one called Badger Balm
  • Membership to Plant Amnesty, UBC Botanical Garden or VanDusen Botanical Garden.

My master gardener friend Heather Neilsen recommends giving Felco ergonomic pruners, which I’ve used and are great; solar LED lights (the kind you stick in the ground); a compost barrel with handles and on a stand (not from Lee Valley); and a stainless steel compost bucket with a lid.

Books:
Garden People by Ursula Buchan, with Anna Pavord and Brent Elliott
Photographs of Valerie Finnis, with history and tongue-in-cheek gardening lore from England from the 1950s on.

Plants of Coastal British Columbia by Jim Pojar and Andy MacKinnon
A must have book on native plants. Also see other Lone Pine publications such as Trees/Shrubs of BC

Guide to Pruning by Cass Turnbull
A very useful guide written with a sense of humour. You will really get the “how to” of pruning from this book in a painless way.