Rob Cross – författare

The third title in the CSIRO Gardening Guide series, Sustainable Gardens by Roger Spencer and Rob Cross shows how horticulture can contribute towards a more sustainable future. Written for home gardeners, professional horticulturists, landscapers, and all those passionate about cultivated landscapes, this book examines the steps we can take towards harmonising gardening activity with the cycles of nature.

Two outstanding botanists from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Melbourne, Roger and Rob have produced a genuine gardening bible for our times. They show how every gardener – both professional and amateur – can contribute positively to environmental stewardship. Gardens may be consumers of resources, but the negative effects of this consumption can be minimised and can be offset by some of the positive contributions gardens make.

Roger and Rob explain the connections between human activity, resource depletion, and environmental degradation. They show how to conduct an audit of gardening practices, materials, and results so that every gardener can measure the impact he or she is having on nature.

They show: how to minimise the impacts on nature of our consumption of water, materials and energy in the garden; how to make gardens more environmentally friendly through design, construction and maintenance phases; the importance of biodiversity and how horticulture can help protect natural systems; and the role that gardening can play in alleviating the environmental impacts of food production.

Checklists are provided so that gardeners can ensure they are taking the most sustainable path through each phase of gardening – design, construction, maintenance. The book ends with a guide round an existing garden that combines physical beauty with sustainability, and discusses future trends for sustainable horticulture.

In an increasingly urbanised world, parks and gardens are our main point of contact with nature. If we can maximise the environmental benefits of our gardens, public spaces and landscapes, we will make a huge contribution to sustainable living. This book if the first to show us how.

Plant Names is an invaluable guide to the use of scientific, commercial and common names for plants and the conventions for writing them. Written by horticultural botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, this book covers the naming of wild plants, plants modified by humans, why plant names change, their pronunciation and hints to help remember them, along with updated sections on trademarks and plant breeder''s rights. The final section provides a detailed guide to resources useful to people using plant names.

This fourth edition is based on the recently updated International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants and the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants. It makes this technical information readily understandable to a range of readers, including botanists, publishers, professional horticulturists, nursery workers, hobby gardeners and anyone interested in plant names.

How a million little things are dragging you down, and what to do about it.

There''s a force we encounter every day that we aren''t aware of—and it threatens to derail otherwise promising careers and lives: microstress.

This hidden epidemic of small moments of stress has insidiously infiltrated both our work and our personal lives with invisible but devastating effects. Microstress doesn''t trigger the normal stress response in our brains to help us deal with it. Instead, it embeds itself in our minds and accumulates daily, one microstress on top of the other. The long-term impact can be debilitating. Unregistered microstress weighs us down, damages our physical and emotional health, and contributes to a decline in our well-being. What''s more, microstress is baked into our lives. The source is seldom a classic antagonist, such as a demanding client or a jerk boss. Instead, it comes from the people with whom we are closest: our friends, family, and colleagues.

The good news is that once you understand microstress, you can fight back. Drawing on fresh research, Rob Cross and Karen Dillon explain the science behind the phenomenon. They also share the secrets of a small set of people who''ve endured their share of microstress but have still managed to cultivate relationships that enable them to thrive both at work and in life. Compelling interviews with these high achievers bring to life best practices that show you how to build resilience against microstress and ultimately how to find purpose—purpose that helps you break free from this quietly invasive force that''s stealing your life.