Smith, Miranda 1944-

PERSONAL:

Born June 19, 1944.

ADDRESSES:

Home—St. Petersburg, FL.

CAREER:

Writer, gardener, gardening educator.

WRITINGS:

(Compiler) Organizing Community Gardens: An Annotated Bibliography, National Center for Appropriate Technology (Butte, MT), 1979.

Greenhouse Gardening, Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 1985.

(With Anna Carr) Rodale's Garden Insect, Disease, and Weed Identification Guide, illustrations by Robin Brickman, Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 1988.

Backyard Fruits and Berries: Everything You Need to Know about Planting and Growing Fruits and Berries in Your Own Backyard, Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 1994.

200 Tips for Growing Flowers in the Northeast, Chicago Review Press (Chicago, IL), 1996.

200 Tips for Growing Vegetables in the Northeast, Chicago Review Press (Chicago, IL), 1996.

(With others) Rodale's Pest and Disease Problem Solver: A Chemical-Free Guide to Keeping Your Garden Healthy, Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 1996.

(And editor) Eyewitness Living Earth, DK Publishing (New York, NY), 1996.

Your Backyard Herb Garden: A Gardener's Guide to Growing over 50 Herbs plus How to Use Them in Cooking, Crafts, Companion Planting, and More, Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 1997.

Advanced Home Gardening: Cutting-Edge Growing Techniques for Gardeners, Creative Homeowner (Upper Saddle River, NJ), 2001.

(Editor) Michelle Wiggins How Does Your Garden Grow: Gardening for Kids, Creative Homeowner Press (Upper Saddle River, NJ), 2002.

Gardener's Problem Solver, Reader's Digest (Pleasantville, NY), 2004.

Complete Home Gardening: Growing Secrets & Techniques for Gardeners, Creative Homeowner (Upper Saddle River, NJ), 2006.

The Plant Propagator's Bible: A Step-by-Step Guide to Propagating Every Plant in Your Garden, Rodale (Emmaus, PA), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Longtime gardener Miranda Smith has made growing things and writing about them her career for more than three decades. A resident of St. Petersburg, Florida, Smith takes advantage of the warm and inviting climate to produce a wealth of luxurious gardens and is intent on teaching the skill of successful gardening to anyone willing to learn. She has written a number of books designed to help readers enjoy the process of creating and nurturing their own gardens, many of which have been best sellers. Her books revolve around the ease with which a garden can be created, regardless of space allocated to the task, or who the gardener may be, and she includes children as well as adults as her students. Smith also acknowledges the need for different gardening approaches depending on the geographic region, and offers helpful advice for any level of gardener who is attempting to troubleshoot any gardening errors or confusion.

Smith's first book, for which she acted as the compiler, was Organizing Community Gardens: An Annotated Bibliography, published in 1979 when the idea of community gardening was still relatively new. Community gardens work under the principle that those participating either have no land of their own suitable for developing a garden, or, in some cases, have insufficient skill and/or time to devote to a garden and to making it thrive. The concept itself is actually not new, merely recycled, as community gardens would have been much more common during the nation's earliest days, when members of new settlements sometimes worked together toward the common goal of growing a sufficient amount of food to keep them all alive. However, in modern-day America, community gardens have grown up in cities where neighbors share a garden developed on a single, sometimes abandoned, plot of land. The projects have provided the communities with numerous benefits, ranging from a small crop of fruits and vegetables to either eat or sell, a more solid sense of community as the people involved work together in the garden, to helping to beautify a corner of the neighborhood, particularly important in the case of community gardens that have been developed in areas that are struggling economically.

Smith has gone on to write several books, including Greenhouse Gardening, a guide to how to best utilize the space available in a greenhouse to produce the best, most personal garden, Backyard Fruits and Berries: Everything You Need to Know about Planting and Growing Fruits and Berries in Your Own Backyard, and Your Backyard Herb Garden: A Gardener's Guide to Growing over 50 Herbs plus How to Use Them in Cooking, Crafts, Companion Planting, and More. She also wrote 200 Tips for Growing Flowers in the Northeast and 200 Tips for Growing Vegetables in the Northeast.

In addition to her general guides to gardening and use of space, Smith acknowledges that outside forces may have a major effect on the success of your gardening efforts. Rodale's Garden Insect, Disease, and Weed Identification Guide, which she wrote with Anna Carr, offers gardeners a line of defense against some of a garden's natural enemies, as does Rodale's Pest and Disease Problem Solver: A Chemical-Free Guide to Keeping Your Garden Healthy.

In Advanced Home Gardening: Cutting-Edge Growing Techniques for Gardeners, Smith takes her readers to the next level, assuming a certain comfort zone with the gardening process and teaching the more advanced gardener ways in which they can improve upon their efforts. A contributor to the Midwest Book Review Web site called the book "a first-class guide for the serious-minded home gardener." Likewise, The Plant Propagator's Bible: A Step-by-Step Guide to Propagating Every Plant in Your Garden goes beyond simple gardening techniques and instructs the reader on ways to economically increase the varieties of plans in their garden. Carol Haggas, in a review for Booklist, remarked: "Smith covers all the bases in this rudimentary and practical guide."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 1, 1997, review of Eyewitness Living Earth, p. 1308; March 15, 2007, Carol Haggas, review of The Plant Propagator's Bible: A Step-by-Step Guide to Propagating Every Plant in Your Garden, p. 11.

Book Report, March 1, 1997, Carol A. Burbridge, review of Eyewitness Living Earth, p. 53.

Reference & Research Book News, December, 1988, review of Rodale's Garden Insect, Disease, and Weed Identification Guide, p. 29.

School Librarian, August, 1996, review of Eyewitness Living Earth, p. 125.

School Library Journal, October, 1996, review of Eyewitness Living Earth, p. 140; October, 1996, Cathryn A. Camper, review of Eyewitness Living Earth, p. 140.

School Science and Mathematics, November, 1997, John Eichinger, review of Eyewitness Living Earth, p. 393.

Science Books & Films, December, 1996, review of Eyewitness Living Earth, p. 275.

SciTech Book News, January, 1989, review of Rodale's Garden Insect, Disease and Weed Identification Guide, p. 28.

Voice of Youth Advocates, February, 1997, review of Eyewitness Living Earth, p. 354.

ONLINE

Midwest Book Review Web site,http://www.midwestbookreview.com/ (December 1, 2007), review of Advanced Home Gardening: Cutting-Edge Growing Techniques for Gardeners.