Also of interest…in gardens and green thumbs

A Garden of Marvels

by Ruth Kassinger (Morrow, $26)

“Forget Fifty Shades of Grey,” said Billy Heller in the New York Post. In a book whose subtitle promises insights into “how we discovered that flowers have sex,” Ruth Kassinger has mixed in more than a few passages “that would make Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele blush.” But the procreation talk serves a purpose in Kassinger’s “informative and entertaining” blend of gardening memoir and history of botany. The author even uses her new insights to cultivate a multifruit “cocktail” tree.

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Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening

by Carol Wall (Amy Einhorn, $26)

“No green thumb is required to enjoy the warmhearted pleasures of Carol Wall’s moving memoir,” said Patty Rhule in USA Today. Its story begins when the author hires a Kenyan immigrant to tend her garden in Virginia and makes the mortifying mistake of assuming he’s uneducated. Giles Owita turns out to be not just a “gracious, generous” man but a Ph.D. in horticulture. As Wall’s garden blossoms, so does a “transformative” friendship.

The Soil Will Save Us

by Kristin Ohlson (Rodale, $24)

Kristin Ohlson’s “breathless but important” new book sheds light on a surprising potential remedy to global warming, said Dean Kuipers in the Los Angeles Times. Some farmers and scientists now believe that rising temperatures can be reversed by improving farming and forestry techniques so that the soil is used as a carbon bank. Ohlson, who’s a journalist, is “a little too gobsmaked by the science,” but her book is “a fast-paced and entertaining shot across the bow of mainstream thinking.”

The Gardener of Versailles

by Alain Baraton (Rizzoli, $27)

“For sheer fun,” this book by the Palace of Versailles’s chief gardener is hard to beat, said Jonathan Lopez in The Wall Street Journal. Alain Baraton, who’s lived and worked on the palace grounds for nearly 40 years, proves delightful when describing his daily routines, which include humoring eccentric regular visitors and talking to trees that he’s given nicknames. Though Baraton gets some of the palace’s history wrong, it’s hard not to fall for his easy Gallic charm.