The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-Less, Grow-More Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden
A picture is worth a thousand words, and Soler�s guide to combining vegetables, flowers, herbs, and fruit trees for front yard curb appeal proves it. This �germinatrix� demonstrates with numerous full-color, page-filling photos the literal and figurative beauty in transforming a �wasteful time-consuming, toxic monoculture . . . an anti-social space� into a �more evolved and exciting version of front yard beauty that prizes health, diversity, and pleasure over short-term convenience.� Soler�s suggestions for well-designed lawn alternatives emphasize color, form, and varietal texture found in such commonplace and utilitarian flora as apple trees, fragrant basil with its African Blue blooms, and the �burnished stems, elongated leaves, and purple lacquered fruit of eggplants.�  An alphabetical listing of ornamental edibles from apples to wormwood (a genus of insect-repelling plants with silvery foliage as intoxicating�visually, that is�as its putatively hallucinogenic distillate, absinthe) combined with landscaping tips for various building styles and a resources list round out a useful and inspiring volume. --Whitney Scott