The Texas Flowerscaper

Gardening/Flowerscaper Series

-Flip pages
-Height and zone guides
-Watercolor illustrations for bloom, color, and texture

Kathy's creative format will delight "lazy gardeners!" Her promotion of hardy plants for Texas' unique growing climates will help gardeners succeed where they may have failed before using nationally written horticultural guides.

—Brenda Beust Smith, Houston's "Lazy Gardener"

Kathy Huber's Flowerscaper will bring to Texas gardeners an easy-to0use, practical-yet-informative source for plant selection. Her choice of plants is excellent." —Sally McQueen Squire, Houston's "Bulb Lady"

Garden color comes alive from the pen of a top Texas gardening writer Kathy Huber. A must read . . . a must addition to your gardening library. —Bill Zak, KTRH Gardenline program host

Gardening/Flowerscaper Series

-Flip pages

-Height and zone guides

-Watercolor illustrations for bloom, color, and texture

Kathy's creative format will delight "lazy gardeners!" Her promotion of hardy plants for Texas' unique growing climates will help gardeners succeed where they may have failed before using nationally written horticultural guides.

--Brenda Beust Smith, Houston's "Lazy Gardener"

Kathy Huber's Flowerscaper will bring to Texas gardeners an easy-to-use, practical-yet-informative source for plant selection. Her choice of plants is excellent." --Sally McQueen Squire, Houston's "Bulb Lady"

Garden color comes alive from the pen of a top Texas gardening writer Kathy Huber. A must read . . . a must addition to your gardening library. --Bill Zak, KTRH Gardenline program host

Craig Flournoy - Dallas Morning News

They like to feel Art between their fingers and the scent of a rose bud close to their nose.

Kathy Huber wants gardeners to step back and view the whole landscape. As encouragement, Ms. Huber, garden editor for the Houston Chronicle has put together a gem of a book.

The title is unwieldy: The Texas Flowerscaper: Seasonal Guide to Bloom, Height, Color and Texture (Gibbs-Smith, $ 22). The book isn't.

Ms. Huber's work allows the reader to compare and contrast more than 400 flowers, shrubs, herbs, ornamental trees and tropical plants - each geared to weather in Texas. Its ingenuity is in its arrangement.

Using color-coded pages, Ms. Huber classifies plants as one of three types: warm weather, cool weather and year-round. Each plant is presented on a tri-cut page that allows the reader to experiment with all sorts of combinations.

How about sweet violet, with its dark green rounded leaves and purple flowers, next to yellow-and-white Shasta daises? Or the lavender-blue blooms of aster with the gray-green, pointed foliage of rosemary. The potential combinations are endless.

Each section includes the height of the plant, how it can be propagated, how much sun it likes, how and where to plant, the best fertilizer to use, how to combat common diseases, and hundreds of other tips.

I particularly like the author's decision to use drawings rather than photographs. Each plant is illustrated in two ways, in the ground and up close. And the drawings by J. Lynn Peterson are beautifully done.

My main complaint is the book's size. The pages measure less than 7 by 8 inches; each plant takes up a third of that space. The index, with its minuscule entries, is downright awful.

I want more. Of course, like many gardeners, I'm greedy. More varieties. More space. And more practical gardening books like The Texas Flowerscaper.

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A life-long plant enthusiast with a keen interest in garden design, Kathy Huber has been the gardening editor for the Houston Chronicle for nearly twenty years. She acquired her passion for and adoration of gardening from her mother and grandmother. Kathy is active in the Houston community organizing public garden presentations, seminars, and garden club and nursery activities. She lives in Houston.