Easy Care Native Plants: A Guide to Selecting and Using Beautiful American Flowers, Shrubs, and Trees in Gardens and Landscapes [Hardcover]

Patricia A. Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 1996

North America's magnificent plant life has a peculiar history in that it is generally regarded as weedy material in its native meadows and woodlands and viewed as a horticultural treasure trove abroad. In Easy Care Native Plants, Patricia A. Taylor seeks to change this situation by emphasizing the elegant beauty, rather than the common naturalness, of American flora and by urging gardeners to capture the exquisite essence of its blossoms and foliage in artistic compositions.

The book is divided into three sections, each filled with color photographs and containing special lists of plant recommendations from horticultural experits in the United States, Canada, and Europe. These suggestions include natives for city patios and decks, shrubs for winter interest, colorful flowers for drought situations, and prairie plants for a formal front yard display.

The first section reviews the history and current use of native American plants and includes a brief primer on garden design. The second presents profiles of eighteen public and private gardens in Canada and the United States and highlights the crucial role of horticultural organizations and garden clubs in spreading the good news about native flora.

The last section is devoted to detailed descriptions of over 500 plants, chosen not only for their handsone appearance but also for their ability to flourish without the use of pesticides or fertilizers. With them, gardeners everywhere will have yearlong beauty requiring minimal maintenance.

While many of the plants cited in the book are little known, all are commercially propagated and available. The Appendix lists sources for each plant category and describes a select number of mail-order firms, including ordering information.

Easy Care Native Plants has been written and designed to be a usable, definitive resource for the full specturm of those who love and appreciate beautiful plants, from weekend gardeners to landscape designers and architects.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This congenial guide from the author of The Weekender's Gardening Manual frames a persuasive argument for gardening with low-maintenance native plant material. For centuries, Taylor points out, domestic gardeners have bypassed a wealth of local beauties in favor of high-maintenance prima donna imports. Ironically, the very gardeners they sought to emulate?namely, the British?have long prized many of these neglected American garden gems. Taylor's briskly informative historical background section also charts the growing appreciation of what she calls "our floral heritage" (spurred on by such political champions as Lady Bird Johnson and President Clinton, who required, in a 1994 executive memorandum, that regional plants be used in all federally funded landscaping projects). A section on public and private gardens ranging across the country's gardening zones and climates offers a guided tour, with observations from gardeners specializing in native horticulture and lists of their "top dozen favorites." The final section, "The Plants," delivers detailed descriptions of recommended native trees, shrubs, groundcovers, perennials, etc., and is followed by a helpful appendix of suggested nursery sources. Thoroughly researched and written with humor and verve, Taylor's book is both inspiring and practical and should help win converts to the growing native plant movement.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Taylor (The Weekender's Gardening Manual, Holt, 1995) makes a persuasive argument for gardening with native American plants. The hundreds of plants profiled in chapters on trees, shrubs, groundcovers, climbers, bulbs, annuals, ferns, grasses, and perennials range from the familiar (butterfly weed, tulip tree) to the exotic (balloon vine, fringe cups). All were recommended as "best" by horticulturalists and amateur gardeners, many of whose gardens are described in a section on public and private gardens. Other chapters discuss design, an excellent historical overview of the development of native plants for American gardens, and the use of natives today (for example, in highway beautification). Carole Ottesen's The Native Plant Primer (Crown, 1995) covers many of the same plants but at $50 may be too pricey for some libraries. Taylor's book is highly recommended as a substitute or companion to Ottesen's in both public and academic libraries.?Beth Clewis Crim, Prince William P.L., Va.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (December 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805038612
• ISBN-13: 978-0805038613
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,197,357 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Engaging, well written reference... with a few gaps, February 26, 2000

By 

I. Westray (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Easy Care Native Plants: A Guide to Selecting and Using Beautiful American Flowers, Shrubs, and Trees in Gardens and Landscapes (Hardcover)

This is a good choice for the beginning native gardener who needs a sense of the range of native plants available. It's a pleasant browse, and provides a representative sample of the choices you might make with natives. I appreciated the straightforward tone of the writer, who studiously avoided the pretensions of some of the more unctious coffeetable books. Let's just say she's gardening in urban New Jersey, not in northern California, and leave it at that.

On the other hand, there are some gaps in Ms. Taylor's knowledge that make this a less than definitive reference. The short version is that she's often recommending a plant based on the sendup of an arboretum or public garden with which she's corresponded, and that sometimes she hasn't done the research to back that recommendation up. For an egregious example, she describes the American form of Bittersweet (Celastrus Scandens) in a way that clearly demonstrates that she doesn't know the difference between it and the invasive asian form. That sort of slip is a real problem, both philosophically and practically, for someone who's into native plants. Oops.

All in all, I'd say this is a useful book that gets you interested in the plants, but that you should do a healthy amount of leg work elsewhere before you plant. The research is half the fun anyway...

For another native plant reference, with less species but more reliable context and detail, try C. Colston Burrell's A Gardener's Encyclopedia of Wildflowers.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It genuinely does make a few mistakes, June 26, 2001

By 

I. Westray (Minneapolis, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Easy Care Native Plants: A Guide to Selecting and Using Beautiful American Flowers, Shrubs, and Trees in Gardens and Landscapes (Hardcover)

Not to belabor a nitpicker's criticism, but this book does include a few gaffes that compromise its use as a reference. I do very much enjoy the book, and my review below reflects that. But it just gets some things wrong.

For example, the species of Bittersweet southern gardeners have trouble with is Celastrus Orbiculatus -- oriental bittersweet. Yep, it's highly invasive, and yes, it can "consume entire forests" as this author says "bittersweet" does. The native American Species is Celastrus Scandens. The two differ in the position of the berries on the vine, partly... and they also differ in that the native one isn't swallowing entire forests. They're hard for an intelligent amateur to tell apart when looking at an individual plant... which is exactly the problem that this book has, too.

There's a HUGE difference between American chestnuts -- enormous trees now nearly gone from their native range due to blight -- and the shrubby asiatic Chestnuts that were brought in by nurseries and that carried the blight into this country in the first place. That's exactly the sort of distinction a gardener interested in native plants wants to know about, and it's basically the one this book misses with the two Bittersweets. In a lot of cases it's that sort of thing that got us into native gardening in the first place. So, see, it's bad to make this kind of error in a book on native plants.

Again, this is a decent book that just slips up in a few spots.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent, clear guide to native plants, July 11, 1999

By 

Floradiva (New York State) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Easy Care Native Plants: A Guide to Selecting and Using Beautiful American Flowers, Shrubs, and Trees in Gardens and Landscapes (Hardcover)

This is an excellent introduction to native plants and one that should be in every native plant enthusiast's library. It's easy to look up the plants you need more information about, and the pictures are very helpful. I use it often as a reference.