Customer Reviews

California Home Landscaping (English and English Edition)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I recently moved to Northern California and have been looking for a landscaping book that provides geographically suited plants, shrubs and perennials. This book provides ideas, alternatives for shady and sunny spots, planting graphs for annual growth and great arbor ideas. Well worth the price, packed full of ideas for the beginner and expert gardener. You won't be disappointed.

If a person were limited to only one book of this type, "California Home Landscaping" would be my choice. Twenty-four different landscaping situations are presented in detail with variations and the plants illustrated are identified by name. The mid-section of the book discusses hardscaping,water delivery and basic care of plants and the last section contains plant profiles with color photographs. All in all, a great resource!

For anyone who is planning some garden design, this is a great book. Wonderful photography and display of before and after pictures. A very good quality book for the price.

This is a terrific book. I already had many assorted Sunset books and others, but still needed help! This this one is full of many useful ideas.

For us gardeners who are designed-challenged, this book is the cure for our artistic inabilities. I tend to plant in straight rows, with no conception of color coordination or eye-pleasing placement of plants. California Home Landscaping is filled with easy-to-follow "garden planting maps": the right plants, the right spacing, the right shape! One great section offers designs for a very common hard-to-plant area... curbside strips. This zone between the street and the sidewalk doesn't have to be a rectangle of beat-up lawn. California Home Landscaping has suggestions for beautiful yet tough plants that can fill this difficult part of the yard. And if deer are a problem in your area, this book has a great picture and plan of an unobtrusive fence that is only five feet high, yet keeps the deer out.

This book is put together just fine. Certainly geared towards the novice. Covers extremely traditional designs - a bit boring for my tastes. If you want your yard to look like any newly landscaped home or business in CA, this should do fine. If you are looking for design ideas that could help you create a unique design keep looking. Best section is the plant references at the end - but again, these are largely the tried and true and very common species.

I am a novice gardener. This book is a great starting point for my landscaping projects. I like the fact that they give several options to each layout dependant upon whether it is a sunny or shady location.

Great diagrams and suggestions. I bought this book for my daughter for ideas for her first house.

I was a bit disappointed in this book. Almost all of the illustrations in the book are drawings that make it difficult to tell what the plants really look like, only the most general compositional effects (e.g., colorful blobs next to long green fronds). The photographs they've included are much more interesting than the drawings, but the plants aren't labeled. Also, they frequently reused the same plants in the different examples. Although this is ok to a degree, I was expecting to encounter a wider variety of plants and some more creative combinations.

I bought two books to learn about SoCal plants to help me pic a landscape design for the front of my house. The other book was not nearly as helpful. The diagrams in this book really help you to understand how plants should be paired. Even though the space I had to work with did not resemble any in the book, I did look for sunny spaces similar to mine and plants that were nice looking and easy to care for. I highly recommend the book !