Customer Reviews

An American Cutting Garden: A Primer for Growing Cut Flowers Where Summers Are Hot and Winters Are Cold

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An American Cutting Garden provides in depth information for anyone interested in growing his own cut flowers. Whether you are a novice or a pro, this book offers practical advice that gardeners of all experience levels will enjoy. You'll no longer have to pour through book after book to decide what to grow and how to grow it. Everything you need to know about a cutting garden is contained in these pages.

So many garden books so little time! Yet take time for McIntire's hands on common sense. McIntire has spent 14 years experimenting and learning. It's as if your friend had decided to help you get started. And she can write. No matter where you are gardening, McIntire's got tips to get you started and to increase your expertise if you have already begun. If you are a real novice get a copy of the American Horticultural Society A to Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants (ISBN 8789419432) which has all the pictures of all the plants. But, if you want to learn what to plant under what conditions and how to succeed no matter how small, how shaded, how unfavorable your conditions might be, McIntire will, with writing which approaches the garden writing greats in style, lead you in the right direction. Skill is not the secret. But McIntire will provide you with the skills she has developed and the love for the process of gardening that nurtures every gardener, new or old. Best of all she will not send you out to buy 18 irises at $18.00 each. You can start with packets of seed. She follows in the footsteps of Henry Mitchel and Elenor Perenyi. Yet she provides simple access. Any latin or common name can be found in her Index of Plants. If you wonder how to coordinate various plants so that you have things in bloom over the season, there is a Sequence of Bloom for all the plants mentioned. Now the paperback has 28 color pictures (buy the A to Z). Gardening is much more than the photos in books and catalogues. We don't have Vita Sackville West's gardeners. We don't live at White Flower Farm. We have a small plot of mediocre soil and hope. Suzanne McIntire will provide you with both the knowledge and the intangible sprit to produce a cutting garden with flowers you will love and cherish. Try it. Try it. You will see!

Finally a book that helps me navigate through the garden with a bit of information that is useful.I had great success using this text as a tool to prepare my beds for spring and summer. My garden looked beautiful. I experimented with new plants well.

The new paperback has 28 new color photos with loads of different flowers in them, all identified in the captions and mentioned in the text!

Sensibly organized, this book was a terrific guide for a new grower like me. Though I've long been a gardening fan, I've rarely grown flowers for cutting and never with a plan. This helped make it managable and fun.

This is my "go-to" book on the topic of cutting gardens. Time and time again the author shows she knows of which she writes. The main text is invaluable and the index of plants (encyclopedia) section is priceless - several species and named varieties of many important genera are listed and described. Photography is limited to one small photo section in the middle, but the seasoned gardener will have plenty of photos in other reference books so this is not a serious drawback in my opinion. If I were limited to just one book on the topic this would definitely be THE book of choice. Bravo Ms McIntire - Well Done!