Customer Reviews

Garden Color Book

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I had hoped to use this book to look up specific perennials and compare their colors, but most of the flowers I had in mind were not included in the book. There are 639 plants covered, not just perennials, but annuals, bulbs, vines, and shrubs as well. So considering that there are thousands of varieties of flowers, the chances of finding a particular flower are slim. This book is better used without a specific plant in mind, but to browse through to get ideas of plants of a particular color.

Also, there seems to be a warm climate bias. Many of the plants (not just annuals) are for zones 8 and up. I think northern gardeners would find this a frustrating book to use.

This book solves the problem for so many of us weekend gardeners who are looking for colorful combinations for our beds that work together, but don't have the time to sit and match pictures of plants to get the color scheme correct. Unlike most gardening books that provide you with garden designs too cluttered with foliage to get the impact of the flowers' colors, this book gives you combinations that work in one reference source. It's easy to use, providing a great variety of plants and information for any gardener, but the most useful point is the garden color palette it provides. This book is well worth the purchase just in the time it saves me that I used to spend planting and then transplanting plants to different locations because they didn't work with the surrounding bed. There is nothing more jarring to the eye than looking at a garden bed and seeing that one color that just doesn't work with the others. This is a perfect book for any gardener, from beginner to expert.

Wow...what a lot of fun. The three strips of mix-and-match flip pages are the perfect interactive format for letting your own eye experiment with different color combinations. The consistent quality of the photographs and color printing make it easy to compare how even subtle shifts in color have a powerful design impact. The author's own remarkable plant combinations on each strip are fascinating in themselves. Not just pretty pictures either- the back of each strip identifies the plant, descibes its culture and growing habits and also offers some very good suggestions for plant combinations. One of my all-time favorite garden design books.

I love this book! Not only is it a wonderful visual source for gardeners, it provides useful information like; how to propagate the plant, what happened to it ("mice ate it") or "short lived but reseeds freely". These are all things a gardener needs to know. I bought this book used for a pittance and treasure it like gold.

Take this book out, sit on the floor with all those gardening catalougs if you are like me about 400 or so and plan out your whole spring planting. It's a great way to get over winter.

This is a very pretty book, but it has one major flaw. The plants are listed by scientific name and rarely by common name. This can be a problem if, for example, you just want to see, for example, a pansy, and you don't know the scientific name and don't feel like looking it up.