Country Garden Planner (Country Home) [Hardcover]

Darrell Trout (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1998 | Series: Country Home

Discover the simple elegance and plentiful rewards of country-style gardening! This spectacular gardening guide explores 19 unique creations by gardeners in pastoral, city, and small-town settings across the country. Each country garden, whether large or small, has its own personality and story. And whatever your level of expertise, you’ll benefit from the owner’s experience. Every chapter features: - A beautifully and accurately illustrated garden - An encyclopedia with a color photograph of and salient information about each plant - Mail-order sources - Growing tips - And more! Each featured garden represents a wide range of areas and growing conditions so you can choose a plan suited to your region and taste, and a hardiness zone map makes plant selection convenient and simple. As beautiful as it is informative, Country Garden Planner is sure to make your love of nature flourish. Perfect for gardening enthusiasts everywhere!

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Country gardens" are popular these days. They are distinguished not so much by their location or size as by their abundance, informality, and profusion of color. Country Garden Planner shows 19 beautiful incarnations of the country garden--water gardens, scented gardens, shade gardens, dried-flower gardens--with photographs, plant suggestions, and a roughed-in plan for each. There's also a chapter on creating your own country garden, with advice on attracting birds and butterflies, container gardening, and using structures in the garden. The plant suggestions are satisfyingly old-fashioned, and include color, size, and zone information. Country Garden Planner isn't an in-depth planning guide, but the pictures and text are pleasantly harmonious, providing gentle inspiration to would-be bucolic green thumbs.

From Publishers Weekly

Trout displays the gardens of the U.S., from Maine to Minneapolis, Minn., from the deep South to the Pacific Northwest, in a series of photographic vignettes that illustrate a broad range of horticultural styles embraced under the "country" concept. Urban, rural and suburban gardens are all represented, as are a wide variety of specific themes, from a garden planted for scent to those specializing in dappled shade, coastal conditions, four-season color, easy care and so on. The text for each stop on the tour is breezy and concise, but the real meat is to be found in the accompanying planting plans that provide highly practical tools for admirers to re-create any one of these visions of loveliness in his or her own backyard. Each illustrated plan is followed by a detailed plant list that includes close-up snapshots of recommended plants, together with thumbnail information on preferred habitat, hardiness zone, requirements and culture (however, only the barest of nods is given to such subjects as compost and soil amendment). Rooted firmly in American soil, this is a planner whose eye-catching design and compelling photographs should send readers running for their spades and seed packets.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Meredith Books; 1st edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0696208482
• ISBN-13: 978-0696208485
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 9.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,584,693 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great book of garden plans, March 9, 2008

By 

John H. Whicker - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Country Garden Planner (Hardcover)

I love this book. I keep checking it out at the library. I wish Amazon carried it. I love the variety of gardens and how they break down the different components that make up an english garden. They give examples of single borders, double borders, islands, pocket gardens, cutting gardens, and others which can be used in your own combinations at your own discretion. It makes it a more versatile book than just arbitrary plans which don't explain elements that make up good country design. The pictures are gorgeous and the plant lists are very interesting.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Country Garden Planner, May 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Country Garden Planner (Country Home) (Hardcover)

As a new garderner, I think this book is great grouping flowers together and giving a brief description of the flower/plant. The pictures of what a healthy blooming flower looks like is ideal and I haven't seen such a nice "picture" book like this before. This book would be best used as a reference tool for new gardeners or for those who already know all about gardening but really want to use it as a planning guide. I don't think it would be as useful for someone who wants to see indepth descriptions of the plants.