Customer Reviews

A Gardener's Encyclopedia of Wildflowers: An Organic Guide to Choosing and Growing over 150 Beautiful

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

 

 

Burrell, with his Gardener's Encyclopedia of Wildflowers, has filled an invaluable gap in the literature. Books on wild flowers are widely available, but few offer definitive details on the growing and cultivation of these precious, often endangered, plants. In addition to its stunning illustrations and workable garden designs Gardener's Encyclopedia adds sources for seeds and plants throughout the coountry. It also includes a reading list and an excellent glossary. Altogether an important addition to the gardener's library.

C Colston Burrell seems to be a genuinely professional gardening writer, having written a general perennials book for Rodale too. I'm thoroughly impressed with this book, which does a very good job of placing species in both natural and garden contexts. It also gives adequate treatment to the basics of native garden care in some introductory chapters.

A Gardener's Ency of Wildflowers is not a comprehensive reference; I haven't seen anything I'd call a definitive reference out there on native gardening. Intelligently, Burrell chooses to provide very complete descriptions of a representative sampling of 150-some native plants. In side bars, he sends up other species in slightly less detail, contrasting them with the full description he started from. The format works well. Native gardening is still at the point where you need to do a fair amount of poking around yourself to know what's appropriate to your area and your garden, and this book is a perfect starting point for that process.

The other positive here for me personally was that Burrell is a Minneapolis author. I happen to also be in zone four, and really appreciated the fact that the book had a very healthy complement of species that are happy in northern gardens.

The one absence I noticed was any detailed description of propagating each species. Good nursery catalogs -- Prairie Moon's being one -- include information on when to plant each type of seed, how long to cold stratify it, and so on. Here you get more of a basic description of how fall planting works, in an introductory chapter mostly. After a couple of years with my own garden, I can tell you that isn't quite enough to go by.

Mr. Burrell has been providing useful information on gardening with native plants for
a while now - through his books and columns in magazines like "Fine Gardening."
I am never disappointed when I read his material, and this books fits with the rest.
It's a wonderfully helpful starter's guide to native plants, particularly for east coast
and midwest gardeners.

Fine layout and photographs, but I found this book oddly uninteresting to read.

There are better books out there covering the same ground. One book I like, less exhaustive but more interesting to read, is "100 Easy to Grow Native Plants." If you want something more exhaustive, Cullina's two books on Wildflowers and Shrubs are IMO the best native plant guides on the market.