The Art of Faux: The Complete Sourcebook of Decorative Painted Finishes, by Pierre Finkelstein. Watson-Guptill Publications, 1997

I have several faux finishing books I’ve accumulated over the years (I used to do a good bit of faux and fancy paint finishes), and this is the best one I’ve found. His great strength in this book is various types of fake stone: marble, semiprecious stone, limestone and sandstone. He devotes a lot of space and step by step photographs to stone. A lot of it is fairly advanced, but there is also some easy ones like lapis lazuli. There is one magnificent faux inlaid panel he shows us; a vase of flowers of inlaid semiprecious stones. The finishes most people would start with, especially on large walls, like patinas and distressing, are in there, as well as the high complex art of trompe l’Oeil- painting fancy moldings on walls and doors. Finkelstein is the first author I have seen actually demonstrate *how* to draw the moldings and paint them, complete with shadows and highlights. Other books show a couple of them to you and “And then a miracle occurs!” they don’t bother to tell you how to do them. Trompe l’Oeil is the one faux that always defeated me. Now I almost feel like I could do it, and I happen to have a couple of flat doors that need painting… 

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Two great older cookbooks

Mediterranean Light, by Martha Rose Shulman. William Morrow, 1989

The Victory Garden Cookbook, by Marian Morash. Alfred A. Knopf, 1982 

I lucked out at a used book store in Pullman; they had a selection of cookbooks on their sale shelf this time. I found two that really appealed to me.

“Mediterranean Light” takes recipes from all around the Mediterranean Sea; Italy, Greece, Egypt, the Middle East, north Africa, even France, and reduces the calorie content of them all. While admitting that olive oil is good for one’s health, she cuts the amount of oil in the recipes down drastically. There are almost no dairy products included, and red meat is super scarce. Even chicken doesn’t make very many appearances. There are some fish recipes, and a couple of egg ones. So it’s a good book for the near-vegetarian. The part I love, though, is that the recipes are all well flavored with herbs and spices, so that one never feels like one is eating ‘diet’ food. It’s a complete way of eating. I can’t wait to try the Moroccan Chick-pea soup, among others.

The second book is ‘The Victory Garden Cookbook”, by Marian Morash. Most people are aware of the PBS TV show “Victory Garden”, named after the vegetable gardens people were encouraged to plant during WW 2 to help with the food shortage. Originally a gardening show, it added cooking as viewers wrote in, asking how to cook the vegetables they had grown. Arranged with the vegetables in alphabetical order, from asparagus to turnips (zucchini are dealt with under “Squash (Summer)”), it’s easy to find what you want. The author tells us how to pick them from the garden, what the preferred methods of cooking them are, some simple methods, the yields, how to store and preserve, and hints; and then we get the recipes, both simple and more complex. Note that this book *does* use heavy cream, cheeses, sour cream, and butter; this is not a diet book but more like a farm cookbook. But it isn’t that hard to substitute lower fat ingredients for those. This cookbook may have just pushed my old vegetable cookbook favorite, the Farm Journal one, into number two status.  

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Therapeutic Gardens: Design for Healing Spaces, by Daniel Winterbottom and Amy Wagenfeld. Timber Press, 2015

Gardens can be healing in several ways; they can have a soothing effect on stressed people, they can have features that actually work as physical therapy, they can be geared towards those with limited sight (having tactile and olfactory stimulus), they can increase a person’s sense of worth and independence by having workspaces that those who use wheelchairs or walkers can use easily. Studies show that patients who have a view of plants or plants in the room heal faster than those who don’t, so it makes sense to have gardens attached to hospitals and convalescent homes. The authors state what features must be in place to make such gardens safe and accessible for all users, right down to discussing what paths should be made of and how different lighting affects people with low vision or PTSD. I didn’t really think this book would be more than a casual look through for me but I ended up reading the whole thing, drawn into the details.

While most of the gardens they reference are attached to healing institutions, they also write about community gardens and how those can heal whole neighborhoods. Crime actually goes down in areas with more plants. They also devote some space to gardens for prisoners, those with dementia, gardens for teaching and for those lacking sensory integration. There are a lot of photos as well as plot plans. There are chapters on the nuts and bolts of building the gardens, such as grades, paths, and actual plants. I recommend this book for anyone designing a garden for any of the populations mentioned, even if it’s just for a person in your family. There was a lot of stuff I would have never even thought of. 

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