Fallscaping: Extending your Garden Season into Autumn

Nancy J. Ondra and Stephanie Cohen, two top garden writers and teachers, team up to show readers how to achieve three-season garden color. Join them on a detailed tour through dozens of plants that bring life and color to late-season gardens. Ondra and Cohen identify all the key fall-specific players and explain how to combine them with multiseason workhorse plants to create gardens that move gracefully from spring through the riotous days of summer and into autumn's golden weeks.

Ten complete garden plans put everything together for autumn-loving gardeners. Particularly stunning in the fall but designed to deliver multiseason appeal, they cover a range of growing conditions and color themes. The authors wrap up the season (and the book) with a garden care calendar featuring tips and techniques on how to plant, prune, and maintain gardens all season long so they remain glorious throughout the fall, as well as dozens of suggestions for how to prepare gardens for winter.

Bring late-season appeal to your yard with vines, shrubs, trees, and flowers that retain their good looks through the sweet, golden days of autumn. Nancy J. Ondra and Stephanie Cohen identify all the key fall-specific players and explain how to combine them with multiseason workhorse plants to create gardens that move gracefully from spring through the riotous days of summer and into the last hurrah of autumn.

Beautiful blooms, rich foliage, and dramatic seed heads all have their roles to play in long-lasting fallscapes. Ondra and Cohen discuss dozens of their favorites in each cateogry and offer extensive advice on how best to integrate them into landscapes that give as much pleasure in October as they do in July. Ten complete garden plans pull everything together. Particularly stunning in the fall but designed to deliver three-season appeal, they cover a range of growing conditions and color themes, and will satisfy even the most intense post-summer gardening urges.

Publishers Weekly

Pennsylvania gardeners Ondra and Cohen (Perennial Gardener's Design Primer) bring imaginative ideas, practical techniques and new inspiration to autumn, that often-neglected tail end of the gardening year. According to the authors, the "key players" of "fallscaping" include the multicolored foliage of trees, grasses and other plants; flashy seedheads and berries; long-blooming perennials; late-blooming sedums, coneflowers, asters and goldenrod; the surprising fall-blooming crocuses, daffodils and lilies; and vines like honeysuckle and sweet autumn clematis. Ondra and Cohen submit a number of fall-friendly garden plans, complete with shopping lists, from a "high and dry" garden of echinaceas, lavenders and feather reed grass to a vegetable, herb and flower kitchen garden of peppers and basils (to be brought inside before cold weather) and kale and chard (to carry the harvest into winter), with colorful touches of alpine strawberries, sunflowers and pansies. Interspersed throughout are "Fall Techniques," with practical, down-to-earth information on how to divide perennials and design suggestions on planning paths, as well as more wacky ideas like spray-painting seedheads. The book ends with a "Fall Garden Care Primer," delineating ways to evaluate your garden, improve your soil, build new beds, take cuttings, prepare plants for winter, store your tools and care for your lawn (a long section). Full of useful details and lush photographs, this book rounds out the growing year and may fill a gap in many a gardening library. (Aug.)

Nancy J. Ondra is a freelance garden writer and editor who owned and operated a small rare-plant nursery for six years. She is the author or co-author of a dozen gardening books including Foliage: Astonishing Color and Texture Beyond Flowers, which won the 2008 Book Award from the American Horticultural Society); The Perennial Gardener’s Design Primer (winner of a 2006 Silver Award from the Garden Writers Association); and Grasses: Versatile Partners for Uncommon Garden Design. She currently gardens on her own four acres in Pennsylvania; works as a horticulturist at Linden Hill Gardens in Pennsylvania; and contributes to two garden blogs: www.hayefieldhouse.com and www.gardeninggonewild.com.

Stephanie Cohen has received awards from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and Perennial Plant Association, and in 2000 she was named Garden Commentator of the Year by the American Nursery and Landscape Association. She lives in Collegeville, Pennsylvania.

Rob Cardillo has been photographing gardens, plants, and the people who tend them for more than 20 years. Formerly the director of photography at Organic Gardening, he now works for major publishers, horticultural suppliers, and landscape designers throughout the United States. Visit him at www.robcardillo.com.