Book Description
Succulent plants offer dazzling possibilities for garden design and require only minimal maintenance to remain lush and alluring year round. Featuring the work of more than 50 professional garden designers and creative homeowners, this complete design compendium is as practical as it is inspirational. Lavishly illustrated with over 300 photographs, it gives design and cultivation basics for paths, borders, slopes, and containers; hundreds of succulent plant recommendations; and descriptions of 90 easy-care, drought-tolerant companion plants. Beginners and experienced designers, landscapers, and collectors alike will find what they need to visualize, create, and nurture the three-dimensional work of art that is the succulent garden.
Customer Reviews:
informative.......2007-09-20
As a newcomer to succulents, I found this volume to be full of beautiful photos and wonderful information. It is a joy to peruse during a lull or sad moment. I had no idea how vast the subject is...........Debra Lee Baldwin has earned earned her prized reputation.
Just what I needed.......2007-09-18
Want to reduce water use in the garden and had no idea where to start with succulents. This is a great balance of practical and inspirational (pretty pictures).
Just in time.......2007-09-09
Hello Debra,
I am writing to tell you how much I love your book! I moved to
Carefree, AZ
two years ago from the San Francisco Bay Area (where I did garden
design and
everything grew) and have immersed myself in the study of all things
desert.
Your book is beautiful and informative and a breath of fresh air in
landscape design.
Thank you, thank you!
Erin
Great Book!.......2007-09-03
This book provides stunning photo's of some of the most beautiful landscape design work with succulents I have seen. As an owner of a retail shop selling pots for the garden, I leave it on my counter for my customers to refer to for ideas. Good, good stuff.
Wonderful resource for the Southwest gardener.......2007-08-24
This is an outstanding resource for gardeners of the Southwest and in particular Southern California. Excellent photos and very informative text. Provides numerous intriguing examples of what you can do especially if you are seeking to save water and reduce irrigation. What is surprising is all the wonderful variety and amazing color succulents provide year around.
Amazon.com
There's nothing new about the temperate gardener's love of hot tropicals: the not-so-secretly sensual Victorians planted lavish, whimsically shaped beds full of palms, giant reeds, and angels' trumpets, many of which still survive. (Of course, manual laborers were easier to come by in the 19th century.) This book shows not only how to re-create this sort of tropical bed and border, but how to fake it on small city plots and patios with tropicals planted in sizeable containers. Author Richard Iversen, who has gardened professionally in Barbados as well as on Long Island, New York, says, "Popping a banana plant into the soil next to an azalea may look exotic, but it doesn't make an exotic garden." His emphasis on color, texture, and form turns this from a book on novelty gardening into a fine garden-design book.
If you crave a bed of exotic plants and are willing to do a bit of extra work, you can grow ficus and canna in Cleveland or Vancouver, but it is important to realize before taking on a tropical garden project that growing them is a year-round proposition, while enjoying them is a six-month pleasure; in colder climates, such as those colder than zones 7 or 8, many tropical and subtropical plants must winter over in a heated area such as a garage or greenhouse. Iversen is good at imparting this kind of careful detail, showing when to dig up tubers and how to store them, and including a picture demonstrating how early spring bulbs can share the garden with later-blooming tropicals. A glossary of 100 tropical plants at the book's end will get gardeners with a passion for the lush and dazzling off to a great start. --Barrie Trinkle
Book Description
The idea of mixing tropical plants with perennials and hardy annuals has been around since Victorian times. It is now enjoying a newfound popularity because tropical plants are more widely available. Gardeners who want to bring the lush beauty of tropicals to an existing garden, or who want to create an authentic vintage garden, will delight in The Exotic Garden. Although tropicals are novelties in temperate climates, they can successfully be grown anywhere. Iversen shows how tropicals can easily be used as annuals to perk up a garden with color during non-blooming seasons. The author's expert advice shows how to grow tropicals in beds, borders, and containers, select and combine plants, and use the tools of color, texture, and form. Plus, there are special overwintering tips and a full color glossary of more than 100 plants.
Average customer rating:
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Designing with Flowers
Tricia Guild
Manufacturer: Crown
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0517559420
Release Date: 1986-12-13 |
Amazon.com
When your new gardening bible comes with chapters entitled "Birth," "Life," and "Death," you know you're in trouble. But be brave, turn to those chapters, and in some very practical little essays on planting, you'll uncover the very down-to-earth principle from which Piet Oudolf's radical reinvention of gardening is based: plants die.
In the traditional mixed border, shrubs, climbers, perennials, bulbs, and annuals defy mortality; when one plant passes its best, there's always another in the wings, waiting to grab the eye. But such borders have very little impact: there is too little at any one time to hold one's attention. Oudolf wonders why we fight the unavoidable. Why not create borders that bring out the beauty of plants throughout their natural cycles?
Oudolf also thinks our obsession with color is another deadening influence on current gardening practice. Plants have form: leaves, flower heads, and stems have beauty and variety, too, and last far longer than any bloom. Why not create gardens that use the whole plant, not just its genitals? This, as you've probably already guessed, is a recipe for perennials, and without any of that anxious autumn rush to cut down those perfectly lovely bare stems and seed heads.
With these versatile plants, Oudolf would have us all create gardens that change month by month, week by week, even day by day. It's a radical, beautiful vision that's absurdly easy to achieve. In Designing with Plants, Noel Kingsbury has done a terrific job of bringing Oudolf's work within reach of the rest of us. --Simon Ings, Amazon.co.uk
Book Description
Trained as an architect, Oudolf values plants as much for their form and texture as for their color. He is the founder of New Wave planting, a spectacular naturalistic style of landscape design. Oudolf stresses the importance of choosing plants that "live well and die well," so that from birth in the spring through the crescendo of summer to the stark beauty of autumn and winter the garden presents continuing drama and interest.
Customer Reviews:
Inspiration and Implementation.......2005-11-14
Piet Oudolf is one of today's garden design geniuses. He gives us a book that is both inspiration and implementation. He inspires readers to design gardens that are carefully crafted but appear utterly natural. Then he gives us new, creative tools to make these garden designs. Oudolf focuses on plant structures and gives us easy categories for the forms of herbaceous garden plants. He emphasizes mood, light, movement, and rhythm in garden design. Always thinking outside the box, he even champions spent perennials at season's end. Gorgeous color photos illustrate all points. A must-have for both dreamers and gardeners with dirty hands.
Wow.......2003-01-30
The gardens in this book are amazing. As a landscape design student, the designs in this book give me something to aspire to.
The authors do a good job of providing most of the plants names for what you see in the pictures. The individual information about the plants is beneficial to determining their use.
I just love looking through this book and just enjoying the beauty of these perennials.
Refreshing and Inspiring.......2001-10-20
This is not a reference book for active, summer gardening. This is an inspiring book for winter gardening by the fireside, a book from which to dream, plan and design and to gain a liberating aspect of gardening.
This book presents a peerless horticultural perspective on natural habitats and how these might be brought to gardens, delivering unique ways of planting and seeing by shape, form, color, size, texture and, singularly, by light. In this the author awes the reader with the beauty of plants affected by the seasons and their elements: light, fog, dew; rain, frost and snow. As a practical tool to aid the shaping of these gardens, he includes an unconventional index that lists the characteristics, cultural requirements and companions for selected plants.
The photography is stunning, enlightening and informative in its content--and valuable. Through their exemplary quality, serious gardeners and professionals will discover a freer and more natural mode of horticultural expression. This is one of the few gardening books that both stimulates and satisfies the spiritual and aesthetic quests of many gardeners.
Tremendous inspiration.......2001-07-29
Even if the book has designs that seem more than you can handle now, the book is so breathtakingly beautiful that its inspirational value alone make it one of the best I've ever read. In the process of stretching your imagination in just one or two areas, a great deal of result may be seen in your garden, and you will have pulled the target for your creativity up several notches.
Designing with Plants.......2000-06-16
A good resource for the personal landscape and a even better one for the professional. The two authors did a wonderful job laying out the many ways in which plants can be used to create the outdoor room and place. Their bold approach is reinforced beautifully in the full color photographs that are abundtly found on the pages of the book. Not a lot of additional information, but there are numerous lists and tables to help guide in ones plant selection. More slanted towards the professional, yet for the true gardener, a wonderful addition to your library.
Book Description
In response to demand from landscape architects and home gardeners, Natural Landscaping returns to print in an updated and expanded second edition. It is unique in its focus on plant communities; it approaches landscape design as the establishment of natural ecosystems, rather than mere planting of specimens. Emphasizing the natural landscapes of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, this book
o reviews landscaping principles and techniques
o introduces native plant species for grasslands, forests, edge areas, and small wetlands
o illustrates how to evaluate a site and plan for visual effect and maintenance
o presents the issues involved in restoring bogs, ponds, and other wetlands
o offers practical advice on reducing chemical use while still combating invasive plants
o addresses social, legal, design, and planting problems often encountered on residential sites
o discusses natural landscaping for public parklands, civic buildings, school grounds, and corporate properties
Customer Reviews:
Essential resource.......2002-10-08
Natural Landscaping is an essential resource for anyone interested in landscaping with native plants. The importance of learning to use native plants is so important as we face continuing droughts in various parts of the country, including here in Williamsburg, VA. The book is so full of information that I find myself going back to it often. Many thanks to the authors for this fine volume.
Cogent, authoritative advice on how to restore wetlands.......2002-10-07
Now in an updated and expanded second edition, Natural Landscaping: Designing With Native Plant Communities by licensed architect and landscaping authority John Diekelmann and natural plan restoration expert Robert Schuster is a fascinating, "user friendly" instructional guide on basic landscaping principles, as well as cogent, authoritative advice on how to restore wetlands and introduce native plant species for wetlands, grasslands, forests, and more. Black-and-white photographs as well as an inset section of color plates wonderfully illustrate this meticulous, fact-filled, professional quality, highly recommended "how-to" guide for anyone aspiring to enhance or restore native plant communities.
This is a wonderful resource.......2001-10-26
I have the 1982 edition of this book - I stumbled across it and have been amazed ever since that such a book was written in 1982 before this approach to gardening/landscaping was popular.
It is tailored to the midwest, but the technical solidity and sound design concepts should apply anywhere.
Book Description
“The award-winning gardening author and perennials expert addresses plant selection, use and placement, color and foliage effects, and ground cover options.”—Library Journal. “Offering sound guidelines on siting and sample garden plans...features advice on how to use versatile plants in the garden. A chapter on color, providing time-tested combinations that work well in common zones, is also included.”—American Nurseryman.
Book Description
Favorite old varieties of plants are a lot like old friends: easy-going, dependable, and enduring. Even with all of the dazzling new flowers that appear every spring in catalogs and garden centers, most gardeners still treasure those time-honored plants that have proven their worth over many years and earned an abiding place in our hearts.
Heirloom Flower Gardens celebrates more than 300 classic ornamental plants, and explores their uses in the landscape and the home. This charming and influential book is now back in print, and even better than before. It features more than 25 additional plant portraits, as well as expanded information on growing, landscaping, and preserving flowers and herbs for culinary and craft use. Other new sections provide information on creating period plantings and designing specialty or theme gardens.
Author JoAnn Gardner defines the word "heirloom" broadly, and includes a wide variety of plants—flowers, herbs, shrubs, and vines—that were introduced to North America between 1600 and the 1950s. All of them have a simplicity and elegance that make them valuable additions to the home landscape. Most are also known for their hardiness and undemanding natures. Sections on growing under each plant portrait give specific instructions that will ensure success.
Even the common names of these plants sound poetic and evocative, from the airy foliage of love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena) to the delightfully descriptive flower known as policeman's-helmet (Impatiens glandulifera). From foxglove to primrose, bee balm to sneezewort, these heirloom flowers offer a living link to our rich garden heritage, and they exhibit a grace and beauty that never grows old.
Book Description
Seven years ago, James Raimes and his wife bought a country home on nine acres in upstate New York. Inspired by the natural beauty of the land and a desire to learn how to be a gardener, Raimes found himself obsessed with such questions as why gardeners keep moving plants around, what the names of the lawn grasses are, and how one can impose order in a garden and at the same time make it look natural. What, in fact, defines a garden?
Customer Reviews:
The mind of the gardener.......2006-08-19
What an amazing and enchanting book! So different from the run of the mill "how to". The author shares his plans, dreams, hopes, experiences with the reader. (After completing the chapter on Digging in Clay, I was so exhausted that I needed a lie down to recover.) Please can we have a sequel or at least a blog with photos and maps. I want to see it all.
A vivid memoir of the 'gardening bug' involves all.......2006-07-27
Seven years ago the author and his wife bought a country home on nine acres in upstate New York, calling it 'Ginger' and evoking in him a desire to learn about plants and gardening. Raimes grew up in England, so his instinct in this area was always there: his desire to shape a landscape proved challenging, however, and GARDENING AT GINGER: MY SEVEN-YEAR OBSESSION WITH DESIGNING AND PLANTING A PERSONAL LANDSCAPE reviews his efforts, achievements and failures alike. A vivid memoir of the 'gardening bug' involves all.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
A gem.......2006-06-24
The essays and stories that make up Gardening at Ginger are about things like greenness (the color, not the movement), the author's city-born-and-bred wife's reaction to insects that get indoors (not hospitable) and where to place a bench. James Raimes' writing is by turns personable, erudite, witty and earnest, and his book goes a long way toward explaining why gardening, an activity that regularly leaves its practitioners filthy, pooped and bleeding, also makes them so happy.
an earthy meditation.......2006-06-16
Raimes' recounting of his "growing" obsession is subtle, graceful and altogether involving. He includes lots of background from his English childhood, gardening experts he's consulted and absorbed, his sometimes bemused wife who nevertheless stands by his often backbreaking, daylight hour devouring transformation of a landscape into areas of inviting woods, stonework, flower beds, greensward, specimen trees and water. It made me stop and think in a new way about my own gardening and enriched my understanding of what all gardeners do.
A charmer .......2006-06-03
Not only for the gardener, this collection of personal essays draws you right into the writer's life, and his obsession with landscaping the gardens around his second home. His insight into the nature around him--not just the flowers, but the trees, the grass, and the dirt--will give even avid gardeners something new to think about. If his garden is half as beautiful as his writing, then Raimes has done a wonderful job.
Book Description
While many people consider themselves gardeners, it takes something extra to create a garden that is extraordinarily beautiful. Designing with Plants provides that special something, breaking down the process into discrete steps. Topics include the year-round garden, eye-catching plant combinations, special effects (ground covers, planted walls, espaliers), and creating pleasing color schemes through contrast.
Customer Reviews:
For the person who love to garden........2005-11-09
I have a LOT of other gardening books. I really enjoyed this one. New and different ideas about garden design.
Books:
- Designing with Succulents
- Dream Sewing Spaces: Design & Organization for Spaces Large & Small
- Dreaming of Tuscany: Where to Find the Best There Is: Perfect Hilltowns; Splendid Palazzos; Rustic Farmhouses; Glorious Gardens; Authentic Cuisine; Great Wines; Intriguing Shops;
- Earthly Joys: A Novel
- Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine: The Definitive Home Reference Guide to 550 Key Herbs with all their Uses as Remedies for Common Ailments
- Eye to Eye: Facing the Consequences of Dividing Israel
- Financial Peace Jr.: Teaching Kids About Money! : "Cool Tools" for Training Tomorrow's Millionaires!
- Flowering Quilts: 16 Charming Folk Art Projects to Decorate Your Home
- Gardening All-in-One for Dummies
- Gardening with Children
Books Index
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