Friday, October 16, 2009

50 High-Impact Low-Care Garden Plants -- Book Review

Looking for tough love, then this is the book for you. Tracy Disabato-Aust's "50 High-Impact Low-Care Garden Plants" book will make you fall in love with these tough and reliable plants. This is just not another book about perennial combinations, as a fine example of this is Tracy's choice of the Paperbark Maple. This is an easy to care for maple that looks nothing like a maple. It has cinnamon coloured exfoliating bark and red autumn colour. She states it's ultimate height and width light requirements,hardiness and best of all what plants look good with your Paperbark Maple.
This is not to say that Tracy Disabato-Aust's book "50 High-Impact Low-Care Garden Plants" does not include perennials and grasses because it does. The colour pictures are colour accurate, large and inspiring. Each plant comes with a check list of it's atttibutes. For example long-lived, tolerates heat and humditiy, minimal or no pruning, drought tolerant and many more.
"50 High-Impact, Low-Care Garden Plants" is published by Timber Press is a good read and will become a well loved addition to your personal library.
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Bruce

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Green Flowers Unexpected Beauty for the Garden, Container or Vase -- Book Review

Do you need a respite from the garish colour of your garden then transform an out of the way part of your garden into a restful green and white garden. Alison Hoblyn's book "Green Flowers" will help you pick the right green flowering plants to add unexpected beauty and flower colour to your garden. Add green and white foliage to create filler shape and texture to your peaceful and meditative garden. Then with the addition of green flowering plants you will add an element of surprise to your garden experience. Alison suggests Euphorbia, Daylilies, Rudeckia's and more green flowers in her book green flowers. The photographic work is excellent. You can also use these green plants to create a transistion between different flower colours in your flower border. A four start book from Timber Press. A keeper for my personal library.
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Bruce