Review by Booklist Review
Fine Gardening magazine serves as the source for this series of informative design handbooks aimed at novice and more experienced gardeners alike. And the superb photography is bound to inspire and motivate garden lovers of all persuasions. In Beds and Borders, Elisabeth Sheldon and Sydney Eddison are among the authoritative voices who share wise counsel on how to create beautiful plantings. Shady spots, damp situations, and lack of privacy are some of the challenges addressed here. You'll also find ideas for providing structure, shaping space, and combining specimens for eye-catching sweeps composed of textural foliage, architectural shrubs, flowering perennials, fragrant herbs and roses, and glowing annuals. Conifers, peeling bark, fall foliage color, winter bloom, and sensational displays of ornamental grasses are a few of the highlights found in Designing with Plants, a compendium of articles revealing the many ways one can use plant material for maximum effect. As in each of the design guides, you will find charts, lists, and sidebar illustrations pointing out potent plant selections, bloom times, dramatic associations, and the like. Practical guidance and instruction embraces special garden features, such as espalier designs, a tree-lined walkway, and planted paths and retaining walls. The contributors to Exploring Garden Style discuss how establishing a theme can open the way to developing a successful garden design. This handbook includes site plans and celebrates an array of traditional and naturalistic garden designs. Specialized styles such as water, knot, and tropical gardens are featured in the book's final section. Overflowing with useful information, the content spans the making of garden rooms, enriching the soil, eliminating lawns, and landscaping with native plants. Alpines, edibles, ornamental herbs, sumptuous roses, and prairie plants, in turn, inspire horticultural bliss for a bevy of garden writers who eloquently share their know-how. Curb appeal is by now a commonly used term for the process of beautifying the front yard or entranceway of a home. Creative landscaping concepts generally enhance the overall property, so backyards are given equal time in Landscaping Your Home, which offers fundamental advice on creating a landscape design from scratch. This collection of useful and enjoyable articles by expert gardeners includes plenty of how-to information--from measuring and drawing the basic layout, to matching one's house with an appropriate design scheme, and creating important focal points. --Alice Joyce
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
From Ken Druse to Peter Loewer, more than 50 of America's best gardenersDmany of them contributors to Fine Gardening magazine and some veterans of HGTVDhave combined their talents to produce an outstanding new series. Not a compilation of articles from past issues, like the "Best of Fine Gardening" series, these first four volumes recount the contributors' personal experiences in creating their own and their clients' gardens. Individual chapters by each author are devoted to a specific topic such as "Grasses Waken the Winter Garden." Practical advice is given on gardening techniques, from breaking dormancy in seeds to building a wall, stone by stone. Garden plans, color photographs, and plant lists complete each volume. Helpful tools such as the USDA hardiness zone map or the spring and fall frost date maps found in "The Better Homes and Gardens Step-by-Step Gardening" or the "Gardening for Dummies" series aren't included, but readers will not feel the lack. The strength of this excellent series lies in the unique insights and experiences of the authors. The four books are so alive with creativity and excitement, as well as sheer beauty in the illustrations, that no one can fail to find inspiration here. Highly recommended for all gardeners.DNancy Myers, Univ. of South Dakota Lib., Vermillion (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
