What is Valerie Easton reading?

This weekend's featured contributor at Writers Read: Valerie Easton, author of Petal & Twig, a personal approach to making bouquets from the garden, The New Low Maintenance Garden, one of Amazon's Ten Best Home and Garden Books for 2009, and A Pattern Garden.

Her entry begins:

I always have a stack of books going at once, no doubt a hangover from working in public libraries. Right now I’m re-reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and enjoying it thoroughly. When I read it twenty years ago, Gertrude Stein’s language annoyed me, but now I’m more patient with...[read on]

Among the early praise for Easton's Petal & Twig, from Publishers Weekly:

Open your eyes and keep it simple: those are two lessons Easton passes on from her own 40 years in the garden. When selecting and arranging flowers for bouquets, you needn’t spend a bundle buying a bundle of imported flowers.....The result will be unique, local, imaginative, and inexpensive. Color photos throughout illustrate and inspire.

Learn more about the book and author at Valerie Easton's "Plant Talk" blog.

Easton is professional librarian and a garden columnist for the Sunday magazine of the Seattle Times. She writes about gardens and the people who make them for numerous publications, including Garden Design and Organic Gardening magazines.

Writers Read: Valerie Easton.

--Marshal Zeringue