Customer Reviews

Landscaping with Native Plants of Minnesota

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

 

 

This is about the most user-friendly garden book I've ever owned. In the first third of the book Ms. Steiner teaches the how's and why's of native plants, and how to distinguish them from invasive, weedy introduced plants. She shows how to make your gardens wildlife-friendly, drought and disease resistant, and beautiful, describing planting strategies for all sorts of environments (sunny, dry, marshy, woodland, water gardens, etc.) She covers everything about plant cultivation--from weed control, pruning, staking, dividing plants, pests and much more. She also covers garden design, and the photographs of plant combinations are inspiring. One chapter, entitled "A Gallery of Gardens," has many examples of beautifully designed native plantings.

The last two-thirds of the book is an encyclopedia of sorts, divided into Flowers and Groundcovers, Grasses and Sedges, Ferns, Deciduous Trees, Deciduous Shrubs and Small Trees, Conifers, and Vines. She describes in depth many different cultivars of each plant under these headings, how to care for it, what other plants to plant with it, and what its prime landscape use is. This portion of the book is invaluable for planning your gardens, and is great for bringing along on your trips to the nursery.

This book is packed with so much information on both the science and the art of gardening with native plants. If you think that gardening with natives results in a dull, rather colorless garden, this book should change your mind and get you excited about working with the plants nature has so abundantly provided us with.

An excellent resource for those who are wanting to learn to plant part or a lot of their yards using native plants.
The book covers many different types of sites, with pictures of some beautiful native gardens in MN. Good plant resource in back of book.

This is a beautifully illustrated book with numerous tips and ideas on how to plan my landscraping project with native plants. I live in South Dakota so these plans will fit in perfectly in our climate.

This is a great guide of Minnesota (and neighboring states) native plants. You will probably not like it if your idea of gardening is neat rows of flowers or even English gardens. I wasn't thrilled at first sight because it's not "pretty" but once I got into it I changed my mind because as it says it is landscaping with native and native plants don't sit neatly in a row. (By the way, it's more a guide than a landscape book.)