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Overview
One of the world's foremost authorities on perennials offers her experience and inspiring advice on using these versatile plants in your garden. Make your selection, guided by questions that pinpoint the right plants for your lifestyle: Can you spend the extra time required for deadheading, staking, or spraying? Do you want fragrance? Will your selection give you a strong sequence of blooms throughout the growing season? Then, will your garden feature beds, borders, or plantings in front of the house or alongside a path? Or a bog, water, or rock garden instead? You'll uncover sound guidelines on siting and sample garden plans for a range of alternatives. The core here, receiving extensive attention, is a chapter on color, with time-tested combinations designed to work especially well in the most common zones. 8 7/8 X 10.Written by one of the foremost authorities on the subject, Designing With Perennials is the definitive volume on planning a garden with these popular plants. Overflowing with more than 300 full-color photographs, this guide discusses the principles of garden design and plant combinations and advises on how to best manipulate them. Includes three full-color gardening plans.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Here is a book that serious gardeners can sink their teeth into. Harper (coauthor of Perennials: How to Select, Grow and Enjoy ) wastes no space with the basics that can be found in countless other volumes. Right from the introduction, she gets to the nuts and bolts of garden-making. Harper follows a natural progression, from choosing plants to placing them, to combining flower and foliage colors, to making the most of garden features and ornaments. To aid the inexperienced, she presents an 11-step scheme for designing a perennial border. There are also plans, one for the North and one for the South, from two noted garden designers. Noting that ``nothing one reads, hears, or even observes should be considered gospel,'' Harper ventures no generalizations on gardening for the entire country, confining herself instead to what works--or doesn't--for her in Virginia, with frequent contrasts to her native England. At every turn she makes suggestions drawn from seemingly vast experience, with so many innovative planting ideas including suggested substitutes for other regions) as to leave the reader breathless. Smoothly written, laced with wry good humor and packed with inspiring ideas, this holds its own with the classics. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)Book Details
Published
June 30, 2001
Publisher
Sterling Publishing
Pages
336
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780641688140