Customer Reviews

The Gardener's Palette

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If you don't know much about color theory and want some ideas on how to make color combinations work in the garden, this is a good starting point. I didn't learn a lot, but I found the photographs useful as they helped confirm that some of the ideas I have for my own garden should work out.

One topic I haven't seen covered in other books was the impact of house color on urban gardens. Most books seems to assume you have acres of space to work in with a woodland in the background. I have a typical city lot with a 10-15 foot wide border surrounding the house. Thus the background looking from the street or yard is almost always the house, and the background looking from the house is usually another house. The photographs in Eddison's book make it clear just how important the house color is to the overall impression of your borders and beds.

Another nice touch is the way Eddison relates color schemes to works of art (in particular of J.M.W. Turner and the Impressionists). I hadn't really thought of looking at paintings to come up with compelling color schemes for the garden, but I will now!

What a treat--a book about color in the garden that doesn't get bogged down on the differences between cadmium yellow dark and cadmium yellow medium. This is a highly readable book that both experienced and beginning gardeners will find useful and informative. With apologies to James Bond, no one has done it better.