Customer Reviews

Insects and Gardens: In Pursuit of a Garden Ecology

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I found the ideas in this book to be very exciting and the author to have a great sense of humor. I have a Backyard Wildlife Habitat, but I hadn't given enough thought to the role of insects in my garden. After reading this book, I am looking at my garden with new eyes. The author has provided some very good reasons for gardening the way I tend to do anyway - pack it with as many different plants as possible, leave it a little messy, and don't use pesticides. It's very nice to have this approach validated and especially to know why it seems to work! Now I just have to get an insect identification book ...

Insects and Gardens is a double award winning book. It received two of the "Top 10" 2002 Garden Globe Awards presented by the Garden Writers Association of America -- one for Best Book and one for Best Writer, and comes highly recommend by the people who write about gardening. Author Eric Grissell, who is a research entomologist with the USDA, received Best Writing for his clear and concise look at the life of insects and how they "work" to our benefit in our gardens. Publisher Timber Press received the Best Book for an outstanding gardening book overall. Only five individuals and five companies were selected out of a field of more than 300 entries to receive a 2002 Garden Globe Award. The book was selected by a panel of garden communication experts - some Pulitzer Prize winners themselves -- who look for the best books, magazines, writers and photographers in the country. The book was evaluated on accuracy of information, ability to communicate, content, organization, style and originality. If you are interested in the relationships of insects to gardens, to each other and to humans, and how they benefit your garden, this is a must have in your library...

Experienced gardeners are used to the idea that it's impossible (and not the least bit desirable) to have an insect-free garden. The main message of Eric Grissell's book is that a good garden teams with insect life, and that's how it should be.

This is decidedly not a book about how to deal with insect pests. In fact, the author urges us to stop thinking of insects only as enemies to be battled. "Plants and insects have interacted for hundreds of millions of years. Why should we gardeners feel compelled to change this situation in an hour or an afternoon?" he asks.

Grissell's aim is to show gardeners another way. Create a garden filled with variety, he urges. As you might guess, the ordinary yard with its swath of lawn, sprinkling of annuals, evergreen foundation shrubs and tree or two doesn't cut it when it comes to diversity. Instead, he suggests planting as many different plants as you can, and creating a variety of habitats; for example, adding water to the garden creates a new habitat that almost instantly attracts all sorts of life from frogs, toads to dragonflies and birds. If we gardeners achieve diversity, Grissell concludes, "We will have so many plants to think about that no plant will become sacred. And then we will be free of the garden and free to garden."

Eric Grissell's Insects And Gardens isn't another visual guide to insects in the garden, but an introduction to insect biology and the role of insects in garden ecology. From the various orders of insects and how they reproduce to their interactions in the garden environment, Insects And Gardens provides science readers with an excellent survey. Highly recommended!

Even if you are a casual gardener and not building a wildlife habitat you should read this book. The first half is a basic Entymology 101 for the gardener with the second half covering practical application. Every gardener should have an understanding of what is happening out there. It should be on every gardeners 'essentials' list. And on top of all of the great information in this book it also is interesting enough to hold your attention.

I recommend this book often on my online gardening group. It is a valuable resource for all gardeners not just for the information, crash course, if you will, on entymology, but also for the author's own personal advice on gardening near the end of the book. The book goes through each group of insects one by one explaining all about them very well. He explains why spraying for insects is a bad idea whether you are spraying chemical, or organic spray formulas. That goes against most current teaching, but in applying it in my own gardens I found to be incredible for its truthfulness. He explains why spraying once creates a cycle of forever spraying the garden because it kills off the predator insects that would otherwise kill the bad insects, and drives away other creatures that would do the job for you....that it is better to create a balance to do the job and how to do that. It is a book you may well refer to often in your gardening experience no matter whether you follow his advice on spraying, or not.

Insects and Gardens by Eric Grissell is a solid primer on how to help your garden grow the natural way. It helps you keep track of which insects assist your plants, and which ones are going to cause trouble.

The book starts with the basics - just what is an insect? What are the different types, and how do you tell them apart? There are gorgeous photos here, which help you really understand what is being explained.

Then we get on into the garden-care section. the book provides great advice. For example buying ladybugs in a box, as fun as it might seem, is apparently not very helpful - they tend to all just try to "fly home" and leave your garden the way it was.

We learn about habitat diversity - by planning out the garden so that we have a natural habitat that encourages "good" bugs, we let the local, natural beneficial bugs take care of any problems they find. By removing stagnant water, we help to minimize the problem of mosquitoes.

There is a lot of practical advice. For example, sure you want to plant flowers that butterflies love to eat. However, if you really want butterflies around, you need to plant flowers that their LARVAE will eat so the butterflies stay and lay their eggs here.

There's even a section about stings and bites, to help you manage any accidental encounters.

Well recommended!

The most informative book I've read, without being overbearing on the subject. It is as if the author is having a light but descriptive chat with you. Great humor. I,ve been an organic gardener for many years, but I look for, and at, insects differently now. I recommend this book to established as well as new gardeners.

This book is written from a gardener's perspective. However, it might be valuable reading for the entomologist, the ecologist, the environmentalist and the botanist. Insects are considered the most dominant animal in terms of biomass, outweighing and outnumbering humans by 600% and more than 600%, respectively. Some of the primary functions performed in the garden by insects include pollination (vital to the production of the majority of plants of importance to man, which keep us alive), herbivory (eating plants; and plant and animal decomposition), and balancing garden ecology. In the section on interactions between insects and plants, we learn how roots (and tubers,corms, bulbs and rhizomes), crowns, stems, branches, shoots, trunks, leaves, flowers and buds, and seed, pod and fruits can be attacked by insects. Lastly, the author introduces us to a garden in balance where the beneficial insects (pollinators and predators) keep the herbivores in balance. To create this balance, one needs to create diversity in the garden--diversity of plants and of animals, including insects, keeping in mind that some insects can have both beneficial and detrimental activities in our gardens. And, when the gardener intervenes to prevent insect destruction of a plant or plants, it is essential that the treatment be the least toxic substance that works, that it is applied at the best time in the life cycle of the insect, that it is applied in the best fashion to achieve the greatest success and that it does not harm other insects (especially beneficials) or the environment.

Eric Grissell's _Insects and Gardens_ may be a fair introduction for the gardener beginning to be interested in ecological gardening or concerned about the environment one lives in.

The first one-hundred pages are a quick tour of entomology. Contrary to what Grissell says, the student learns significantly more in an introductory entomology course than what he is able to offer in one-hundred pages. The next several chapters discuss insect-plant and insect-insect interactions, and how a garden with diversity can foster and enhance these relationships. The final sections give high-level suggestions for increasing this diversity in the garden, concluding with a broad overview of insect-human cultural interactions. The concluding chapters were, I thought, tacked-on for extending book length and not particularly relevant. A book on insect garden ecology does not seem to need a cursory look at human-insect cultural milestones.

Personally, I found this to largely be a compilation of gardening ideas gleaned from other books about naturalized gardening. These concepts were then taken to a very high level for presentation to, I assume, a target market of gardeners beginning to consider wildlife-friendly gardens. To someone who has read a few books on naturalized gardening, ecology, or entomology, most of this book should be nothing new. If you are looking for plans or suggestions on gardening more than a few paragraphs long, this book is not for you; it is more a collection of basic entomological and ecological theory and a few habitat creation ideas. As a result, I am somewhat disappointed with its prizes (and praises).

A major shortcoming of the book is Grissell's fairly dismissive attitude toward the concept of native plants. At first he ridicules those of us concerned with the relationship between native plants and the surrounding environment, but later acknowledges with a few sentences that native insects are generally unable to use non-native plants, and thus non-natives are not particularly useful for wildlife gardening. Grissell's suggestion for gardeners is to focus on creating diverse habitat types for insects rather than worrying about native vegetation. The problem with this advice is, perhaps obviously, that all the diversity in the world will not matter if insects are unable to actually make use of the plants. Grissell has done a disservice by not emphasizing the importance of native plants to all species.

I also did not appreciate Grissell's colloquial and occasionally flippant tone. When I read a book on methods or theory, I want to be talked to respectfully, not glibly.

In general, this might be a satisfactory book for some people wanting to gather more information on wildlife-friendly gardening. Grissell's bibliography presents several superior titles, however: Swain's _A Gardener's Ecology_, Thompson's _The Self Sustaining Garden_, Marinelli's _Stalking the Wild Amaranth_, and Tallamy's _Brining Nature Home_.