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Overview
Written for today's water-conscious gardener, this book provides cutting-edge information on how to grow more than 270 colorful, unthirsty flowering perennials, shrubs, and ornamental grasses adapted to dry-climate regions. Over 125 large color photos provide ideas to create appealing, easy-care gardens and make it easy to select flowering plants best suited to particular regions. The book was especially prepared for gardeners in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. It provides proper planting dates and recommended plants and growing techniques for each area, and shows how to prepare soils, make compost, and get the most out of water.
Synopsis
Written for today's water-conscious gardener, this book provides cutting-edge information on how to grow more than 270 colorful, unthirsty flowering perennials, shrubs, and ornamental grasses adapted to dry-climate regions. Over 125 large color photos provide ideas to create appealing, easy-care gardens and make it easy to select flowering plants best suited to particular regions.
The book was especially prepared for gardeners in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. It provides proper planting dates and recommended plants and growing techniques for each area, and shows how to prepare soils, make compost, and get the most out of water.
"If you want to grow a maximum number of flowers on a minimum amount of water, [this book] tells you how."--Sunset
Library Journal
These three books focus on different aspects of water conservation in gardening, but all recognize the ecological consequences of wasting precious water to nurture tropical and semitropical plants, or huge lawns, in arid regions. These books show how to maintain attractive, healthy landscapes and gardens using a minimum of water. Water-Conserving Gardens and Landscapes is a practical guide for planning and maintaining a water-conserving garden. It suggests attractive xeric plants from all over the world for various regional conditions, and it includes a list of sources for plants native to the United States. The Low-Water Flower Gardener emphasizes flowering annuals, perennials, shrubs, ground covers, and grasses. It includes both native and nonnative plants but restricts its scope to the arid West: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Texas. The book explains how to design, plant, and maintain a colorful, low-water flower garden. Most of the 125 color photos were not seen. This book is similar in concept to George O. Miller's Landscaping with Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest ( LJ 4/1/91), which covers Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, but Miller's book is a better choice because it provides inspiration for creating harmonious plantings. Desert Landscaping is a more substantial work. As an encyclopedic guide to desert landscape maintenance, it discusses soils, plant diseases, lawns, shrubs, trees, flowers, and cacti. It includes a calendar of maintenance tasks by season and provides many photos of both good and bad maintenance techniques. The author, who has many years of experience as a horticultural extension agent in arid climates, shares his appreciation and understanding of natural desert landscapes. Of the three books reviewed here, Desert Landscaping is the most broadly useful, but all would be welcome additions to gardening/landscaping collections.-- Katharine Galloway Garstka, Intergraph Corp., Huntsville, Ala.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"If you want to grow a maximum number of flowers on a minimum amount of water, [this book] tells you how."—Sunset