Customer Reviews

Fruit & Nuts: A Comprehensive Guide to the Cultivation, Uses and Health Benefits of Over 300 Food-producing Plants

5 star:		(4)
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3 star:		(1)
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I'm a backyard fruit gardening enthusiast and a bibliophile. Physically this book is attractive with nice layout, color photographs, calendar paper, and sewn binding. Timber Press usually does well in this regard. It'll make for an interesting winter-time diversion. It brings to mind another Timber Press book, Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden by Lee Reich. Both books seem to target the backyard orchard enthusiast. "Fruit & Nuts" is much more encyclopedic in organization, style and number of fruits covered (i.e. many tropical/subtropical entries). Mr. Reich's book focuses on a few, less-common fruits that can be grown in temperate areas, so his would be the better choice for the average enthusiast in most areas of the U.S.

Weaknesses with "Fruit & Nuts": Minor ones: wish Fahrenheit instead of Celsius had been used for the North American edition - I find having to do the converting to be annoying; and the cultivar lists for each entry are short and underdeveloped. More serious are several errors (both of omission and commission) I saw in the Ficus carica entry (a tree that I'm fairly well acquainted with). I won't enumerate them here, but makes me wonder if just as many errors were made with the fruits that I'm not so familiar with.

I'm into all kinds exotic fruits. This book is actually one of my favorite reference books. It describes 300 or so fruits in plain language yet comprehensive. Scientific names, cultivars, and common names are listed making this book very useful. Each plant article divided into separate sections with heading, which makes it easy to find the information. Food, health and other uses are highlighted. The book provides very important info regarding hardiness (not easy to find this info everywhere and this is important when deciding what to grow), growing conditions, sun/shade, water requirements, etc. Many high-quality photos. Will definitely recommend this book as exotic fruit reference.

This product is everything it advertises to be and more, simply a must have for any fruit enthusiast. The book is very reader friendly and is filled with an enormous amount of information regarding the nature, use, and the benefits of more than 300 plants. Another wonderful feature of it is the amount of high quality photographs used to facilitate the flow of information seamlessly, so that nothing is left to uncertainty. A person would be hard pressed to procure the kind of knowledge provided by this book elsewhere. I definitely recommend it to anyone who is even remotely interested by exotic fruits.

I often use it and there are so many fruits I've never heard of or edible ornamentals. It is very systematic and for most plants there is even an estimate of how much you can expect to harvest.
One of the best books I have.

This book covers both common and rare fruit & nut plants in an extremely clear, and easy to reference format. Everything is organised systematically, you can find the light or soil needs (for instance) of any plant instantly. It is also highly authoritative, I've found no errors.

A great many gardening books are not so clear & systematic, they chat with you about what a fruit meant to the Ancient Greeks or give the recipe of the immigrant down the road, all jumbled up with growing advice, sometimes this is great, but it can make a book time-consuming & frustrating to use especially if you're right in the middle of a gardening session. (There is some interesting history on most plants but again it is tidily kept in it's own section).

There are illustrations for almost every plant which are helpful & pleasing. Possibly the most practical book on a broad range of fruit & nut plants on the market. I'm also one of those people who believe crop diversification is the future (if there is going to be one) so also applaud the book for it's inclusion of exciting lesser known crops.