Ideas bloom in ‘Succulent Garden Containers’ and ‘Toad Cottages & Shooting Stars’

If soggy flower beds and slippery slopes are keeping you out of the garden, two new books can replace the urge to plant with the inspiration to plan.

Garden photographer and Home section contributor Debra Lee Baldwin takes on common design questions in her new book, “Succulent Container Gardens.” Which plants? With which pots? For which spots on the patio, balcony or deck?

Baldwin’s book ($29.95 from Timber Press) delivers ideas, including a chapter on unusual succulent arrangements in unconventional containers. In one project, a dry birdbath is dotted with round echeveria that suggest water lilies; white-webbed Sempervivum arachnoideum rosettes “sparkle like sunlight on the surface of water” with flat green Aeonium tabuliforme (lily pad aeonium), all surrounded by aqueous green and blue florist’s marbles. In another arrangement, a dry water fountain flows with tiers of sedum, aeonium, echeveria and crassula.

For more inspiration, look to Sharon Lovejoy -- horticulturist, award-winning author and illustrator of books for the young and young at heart. Lovejoy is on a mission to address children’s “imagina- tion deficit disorder,” and her backyard in San Luis Obispo is the play laboratory for projects in her new paperback, “Toad Cottages & Shooting Stars: Grandma’s Bag of Tricks” ($14.95 from Workman Publishing).

Lovejoy garnered an international following in garden circles with her first book, “Sunflower Houses: A Book for Children and Their Grownups,” in print for nearly two decades. “Toad Cottages” is an ecologically inspired guide to 130 green activities that adults and children can do together.

“I wanted my grandchildren to think of my garden as magical too -- full of opportunities, tastes, sights and scents that would lodge themselves in their hearts,” Lovejoy writes. “I didn’t want a garden to mean work. I wanted a garden to be synonymous with joy.”

In an interview, Lovejoy said that when she gives talks around the country, many children don’t know where food comes from.

“One of my projects is to grow a ‘kitchen garbage garden.’ Plant your leftover pumpkin seeds, orange seeds, beans or peanuts on a windowsill and watch them grow,” she said. “You can even do this in an apartment. Kids can watch a pumpkin seed sprout on a wet paper towel and then plant it. Or break open a raw peanut and drop it into a glass jar of wet yarn. I did this with my grandson and he loved it. It’s something he eats every day on a sandwich, and now he sees it sprout.”

-- Debra Prinzing