Integrating expert advice with creative tips and ideas, a comprehensive guide to container gardening offers step-by-step directions for selecting plants, types of containers, and plant care and cultivation, as well as a directory of suitable plants, organized by color and season. 25,000 first printing.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Equal parts gorgeous and practical, Reader's Digest's The Complete Container Garden provides clear and straightforward advice accompanied by brightly colored close-up photography. From spring bulbs to winter berries, the range of plants and containers is tremendous, and the how-to tips are invaluable. You'll find techniques for training vines and topiary or planting strawberry jars, and generous coverage of basics like pruning, feeding, wintering, and deadheading.
The author pays great attention to choosing plants. The ideas for unusual foliage plants are exceptional, ranging from lovely purple-leaved cabbages to aromatic pelargonium. Only two brief pages are devoted to discussing pests and diseases, but the photos are a big help in identifying various creatures--for greater detail in getting rid of them, novice gardeners will need to look for other information sources.
Over 70 pages are devoted to descriptions of plants that are container-appropriate, and you'll have plenty to choose from in all categories--common bulbs and annuals as well as more unusual vegetables and small fruit trees are all represented with growing tips and optimal conditions, so you'll be sure to choose plants appropriate to your environment. Enjoyable inspiration for the novice or expert, you'll find this a worthy addition to both your coffee table and your reference shelf. --Jill Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
Container gardening offers myriad possibilities for growing things in restricted spaces, for adding color to problem planting areas and for providing dramatic focal points to landscaping. British garden writer Joyce concentrates primarily on floral gardening here, demonstrating how to combine color schemes for shady or sunny exposures and how to use foliage plants as a primary focus. More than 400 color photos illustrate the steps involved in selecting and transforming an assortment of containers, from large and costly pottery tubs to recycled coffee cans, into contained gardens. Soil selection and planting methods, the use of liners, hanging baskets, window boxes, pruning and propagation are considered; there are sections on container rock and water gardens. An extensive chapter on individual plants is organized by color of bloom and/or foliage and includes reference to U.S. hardiness zones. "Model Plantings," with lists of ingredients and positioning diagrams, depicts arrangements that seem most likely to thrive in areas of the U.S. that enjoy maritime climates comparable to those in Great Britain. Lackluster, jerky prose and the failure to address organic means of pest and disease control further narrow the overall value for U.S. gardeners.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
57 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Color Groupings Distinguishes This Work,
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This review is from: The Complete Container Garden (Hardcover)
Beautifully presented, this book provides two different functions. The first part of the book is a standard introduction to container gardening, with information about how to plant pots, the order, and how best to arrange them. The author has some very nice instructional graphics to illustrate the steps, disembodied hands working in the dirt. The second and more interesting part of the book involved his breakdown of container plant types by color. Each main area of the color wheel is given a section, and plants for that color are described for spring, summer, and fall/winter. If you like to work and create your arrangements by combining color schemes, this will be very helpful. I'm still at the stage where a book like Hillier's `Container Gardening Through the Year' was more appropriate providing concrete examples that you can go out and put together. Joyce does do that for a variety of pots, indicating through pot-maps where things should be planted etc., but that's not the main thrust of the book it appeared. I did like the presentation and can understand the high rankings this work receives.
76 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
WONDERFUL, and BEAUTIFUL guide to gardening,
By
This review is from: The Complete Container Garden (Hardcover)
I recently got married and decided that I wanted to start gardening. But, I don't have a garden. I just have a very large deck on our new apartment. I have always wanted to decorate a deck or patio and windows with beautiful flowers. I just haven't ever known how. I found this book at a local book store and it has all the information you would ever need to know to set up your garden without a garden. It has beautiful pictures of container arrangements. But the best part is that in addition to the pictures it has diagrams of how to duplicate the arrangement. The book has wonderful instructions for someone like me who doesn't know anything about gardening. I just took my book to my local nursery and showed them what I wanted. I took it home and now I have the beautiful deck I have always wanted. What a fun new hobby! I highly recommend this book. I bought another container gardening book by Rebecca Cole and sent it back. It just didn't have the helpful information that I needed like this book has.
70 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great addition....,
This review is from: The Complete Container Garden (Hardcover)
Charleston South Carolina is a beautiful place, but the thing I like the best about that little city is the gardens. Every garden has containers, and every house seemed to have window boxes or containers on porches. The British also seem to have a penchant for growing plants in containers. The alleys that lie behind the houses in Royal Tunbridge Wells are loaded with potted plants.It you are a potted plant fancier like me, this is the book for you. This is a fine book, a beautiful book, a heavy book. Physically, it probably belongs on the coffee table -- it's too pretty to take out back and smear with manure and sand as you try to replicate the various contained gardens. On the other hand, this book is destined to be outside, it's extremely useful in the garden. Containers are not just for apartment dwellers with balconies. As my yard fills up with this and that, and I look for new ways to hold plants, I have looked up. Contained gardens can be plopped on the patio or into the middle of a patch, but they can also be hung or mounted on walls, porch or balcony railings, and under windows. Containers can be the familiar red clay pot or the familiar red clay pot with a paint job. This book tells you how to paint your pots, shape your boxes, or mold your 'stone-like' containers. Almost anything can be a container with the right preparation. And what to plant? This book indicates the only constraint is your imagination. To get your imagination going, the book contains multiple diagrams that show you which plants to use, how to plant them and other necessary instructions. The back of the book contains a long list of plants suitable for container growing. Each item in the list is described in several paragraphs. The book gives you information for growing things all year round. I have been exchanging my pansies for summer plants every year, but next spring, I intend to grow bulbs in containers.
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