Gardening with Tulips [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Michael King (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2005

This pictorial guide presents a fresh approach to using these popular bulbs in contemporary gardens. The book begins with a history of tulips and moves on to design approaches and tips for various plant combinations. Twenty groups of tulips are described in detail, and a separate chapter deals exclusively with color varieties, making it easy for readers to choose tulips to create a wide palette of color combinations in their garden. Complete growing and maintenance instructions are also provided.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

While tulips planted in uninspired rows lack charm and look old-fashioned, resulting in a gardening cliche, skillful designers like King recognize the beauty and allure of a landscape in which tulips in myriad forms, scents, and colors emerge. Gardeners wishing to learn about the fascinating history and classifications of tulips will savor King's enthusiastic writing, and relish his expert advice on how to use perennials, shrubs, and grasses inventively to allow tulips to shine. Photographs illustrate beguiling examples of Dutch display gardens and bulb fields, ornate bedding schemes, and mixed plantings. Next King offers his top picks: 20 highly varied and excellent types of tulip species and hybrids. Lily-shaped, low-growing multiflowered pastels, and willowy Triumph blooms are among the groups described in depth and shown in breathtaking arrays. As a finale, King addresses the topic of floral color, thus completing a guide that should prove highly useful to any tulip lover serious about garden design. Alice Joyce
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"I'd pretty much given up on growing tulips, but this book is making me reconsider. Not just because of the gorgeous color photos on every page, but because it's filled with specific advice on using tulips as an element of garden design."—Kathleen Purdy, Horticulture, April 2006 (Kathleen Purdy Horticulture )

"Gardeners wishing to learn about the fascinating history and classifications of tulips will savor King's enthusiastic writing, and relish his expert advice on how to use perennials, shrubs, and grasses inventively to allow tulips to shine ... a guide that should prove highly useful to any tulip lover serious about garden design."—Alice Joyce, Booklist, September 15, 2005 (Alice Joyce Booklist )

"This highly illustrated guide presents a fresh approach to using these popular bulbs in contemporary gardens."—Rainy Side Gardeners, May 8, 2006 (Rainy Side Gardeners )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Timber Press (September 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0881927449
• ISBN-13: 978-0881927443
• Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 9.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,604,307 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Reading from History to Selection, Planting, and Care, October 12, 2009

By 

David Gurgel (Roseland, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Gardening with Tulips (Hardcover)

I enjoy growing flowers, shrubs, trees, and vegetables but have never planted tulips. With a nice planting bed available at my office building that looked like just the place for a bed of perhaps 300 tulips, I wanted to get up to speed on their selection, planting, and care.

In this book I got everything I needed plus a fascinating history of tulips that opened the book. Did you know that tulips come from wild growths in the mountainous areas of Central Asia? Cultivated in Turkey as early as 1000 AD, they were not common in Europe until after 1600. Given all of the things we are learning to fear from Central Asia, it is nice to know and instructive to learn of things of beauty that also originated there; perhaps there are more.

The book has hundreds of colorful photos.

5.0 out of 5 stars A "Must Have" for serious tulip lovers and gardeners, August 23, 2011

By 

Coleen Toone (Provo, UT, US) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Gardening with Tulips (Hardcover)

This book was a delight from the moment I opened it. I was searching for something with information about specific, high performing tulip cultivars and I was not disappointed. It covers a wide variety of species and cultivars within species.

The photography is beautifully done and as far as I can tell, colors are as close to accurate as they can get. The written information is extremely helpful to me in my landscape design profession. Thank you, Michael King, for writing to my "plant geek" soul and sharing your magic.

This book will be helpful to me for many years to come.