Customer Reviews

The Flower Garden: A Practical Guide to Planning and Planting (The Wayside Gardens Collection)

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Helen Dillon, Ireland's foremost plantswoman and garden television star has collaborated with American retail mail-order company, Wayside Gardens to produce this lovely garden book. Even though it is subtitled "A Practical Guide to Planning & Planting," I would venture to guess that it is not for beginning gardeners. It is however, a great book to curl up with in midwinter and dream about "'Etoile Violette,' `Duchess of Albany,' `Marie Boisselot, and `Huldine,' climbing and twining their way up the walls,...mingled with white potato vine, Cobaea with their handsome bell-flowers, various jasmines and a Buddleia as an oasis for...butterflies."

As a garden writer, Helen Dillon has an appropriately earthy sense of humor: "You know what they say about Lady Hillingdon (the apricot rose)? No good in a bed but great against a wall."

This book's photographs mainly consist of layered borders and close-ups of particular plant combinations such as "The striking purple leaves of Ricinus and Canna, backed by the air foliage of Rosa moyesii, accentuate the pompon shape of the dahlias and the flower spikes of Kniphofia." Size, balance, and repetition are emphasized in both the photographs and text.

There are chapters on planning, propagating, and caring for a flower garden, and an index of fifty "Key plants for the flower garden." "The Flower Garden" is fun to read or simply browse through the photographs if you can suppress your feelings of envy. Remember that some of the herbaceous borders shown in this book have taken years to perfect, not a scattered succession of Saturday afternoons.