If you’re planning to kick back with a cider and want something edifying to curl up with over the holidays, or you still have gifts to buy, or you just enjoy a good book list, here are some of our picks for green reading from the 2009 offerings (with one from 2008). Cheers!

Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife With Native Plants

By Douglas W. Tallamy

This book explains better than any we’ve seen how native plants support a healthy local ecosystem, providing birds and insects with the best foods so that the entire natural chain of wildlife can thrive.

If you’ve ever wondered why some people make such a fuss about native plants, this is a book that will give you a macro, micro and mini-micro look at your backyard and help you see why. Tallamy, chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware is well informed but never preachy. He shows us how we’ve unwittingly turned our yards sterile, inhospitable places for birds, butterflies and wild life by following thoughtless suburban trends. We put in acres of foreign turf grasses that require chemicals to maintain and “decorate” the perimeter with non-contributing flowering bushes. We get what we think we want – a land without insects — but undermine the food chain, creating a system that requires constant care and propping up. Our yards become chemically dependent.

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