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How to Drink

Author: Victoria Moore
Hardback: 336 pages
Publisher: Granta Books (2009)
Price: approx. 19 EUR

“Over recent years”, says author Victoria Moore, “we have become far more sophisticated about the food we eat, but we are taking a little longer to catch up with our liquid intake”.  This is a book to get you started on the journey. It is also a work of reference for years to come. The format is deceptively simple. First the practicalities: bottles one should consider having in the store cupboard and fresh fruit to have available. There is also good advice about ice and the basics one needs to know about wine and how to store it. Breakfast and Brunch informs about do’s and don’ts on making tea, and there are similar basic suggestions about buying and making coffee. Her wonderful recipes for juices and smoothies are  all accomplished without the need for an expensive juicer. Victoria Moore then moves on to look at drinks for each season: mint juleps at the end of a sunny afternoon, sloe gin in the autumn, hot rum for winter evenings, year round showstoppers, including the world's best Vodka Martini. Accompanying recipes for food are added (mozzarella and rocket crostini go well with Campari), also some interesting thoughts on the drinking habits of the royal family. The Queen would probably approve of Victoria Moore’s advice on making the perfect Bellini. If you are even considering using tinned peaches, then go throw yourself in a canal.

The Fruit Hunters: A story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession

Author: Adam Leith Gollner
Hardback:  280 pages
Publisher: Souvenir Press (2009)
Price: approx. 20 EUR

In this immensely informative and enjoyable book Canadian writer Adam Leith Gollner combines  the talents of a food writer, investigative journalist, poet, travel writer and humorist. He writes of the role fruit has played in history:  Fruit, he points out, has been the motive behind exploration. It led nations into war, inspired religious worship and fuelled dictatorships. Gollner also explores the underworld of fruit: species that are inaccessible, ignored and even forbidden in the Western world. Whether he writes about the jungles of Borneo, the forests of Bali or the vast fruit warehouses in New York - he unravels the scientific, economic and aesthetic reasons why we eat particular fruits and describes the politicial and economic interests behind the mass-produced fruits we all eat. At one point early in the book, the author explains how it is possible to graft branches of different species onto one plant. A Chilean farmer, he writes, recently made headlines with a tree that bears plums, peaches, cherries, apricots, almonds and nectarines. The book is also full of juicy facts: Alexandre Dumas offered his life’s work to the town of Cavaillon in exchange for an annuity of melons. DH Lawrence wrote naked in a mulberry tree. And did you know that Idi Amin ended his days as a fruitarian?

The Vertical Garden in Nature and the City

Author: Patrick Blanc
Hardback : 260 pages
Publishers: W.W.Norton  (2008)
Price: 38 EUR

Patrick Blanc, the inventor of vertical gardening, lives in Paris and is often described as an artist with green fingers. He has created dozens of his admired botanical tapestries in public and private spaces around the world, among them the Quai Branly Museum and the Fondation Cartier (both in Paris and by Jean Nouvel), the Aquarium in Genoa, the 21^st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, the Marithe & Francois Girbaud Boutique in Manhattan, the Siam Paragon Mall in Bangkok. In this luscious, stunningly photographed book, he explains how to grow on vertical surfaces: to create plant walls using more than one thousand plants, drawing on his observation of natural milieus. The book was already published in 2008 but it is an important reference book that will always have a wide appeal  both to amateur gardeners and professional designers who may wish to adopt some of Patrick Blanc’s  techniques.  It shows us how we can use the vertical to add nature too our daily lives.