Customer Reviews

Green Places in Small Spaces: A Practical Guide to Designing and Planting a Small-Space Garden

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

 

 

This book makes me believe I can do anything in the garden. It's rare to pick up a "how-to" book that draws you in and and sounds personal. Green Places in Small Spaces is the antithesis of text book-type writing. This book is great, especially for a first time gardener, and one that doesn't have a lot of time or money to spend on gardening.

I liked the fact that the author spoke to me in the first person, gave good, solid advice backed up with anecdotes, and took me through the seasons. This author is also quite opinionated - - and it made the book a good read. This is the most useful and entertaining gardening book ever written, filled with great advice.

Green Places in Small Places fills a void left by so many other gardening books. You've got a small place. It may be sunny, it may be dark. It may have soil it may have cement. It may even have people walking over it.But Kerwin Fischer will tell you how to make it a "green place." Green, pink, even blue.

Often using examples of a garden he voluntarily cared for in Manhattan, Mr.Fischer takes you from evaluating your space (chapter 1) through how to tend for your small green place through the seasons (Chapters 8-17).

The book is a welcome change from the many books that are often too "flowery" and abstract to help you get started. But the book does a good job of avoiding technical language (although it does provide a useful explanation of technical terms.)

Highly recommended.

Although a good book on planting a small garden this book is not, as I thought by its title, a book on designing small gardens. There are only two fairly complete gardens shown amidst the many beautiful pictures of plants. The book deals almost exclusivly with the planting and growing of flowers, primarily perennials, bulbs,has a chapter on houseplants and treats the subject of soil amendments, fertilizers and such. If you need to know what plants to use in your small garden, this book will help.

This good is a clear step-by-step blueprint for creating a garden virtually anywhere. The author has a dry, ascerbic wit and is a great debunker of misconceptions about plants, as well as a bit of a plant historian. It's a really good read, as well as a really good manual.

This is a great book for the beginning gardener, but does not provide much information or inspiration for anyone who already knows the basics.