Honestly, I'd love to give this book more than 2 stars, because it so clearly covers material needed by gardeners in our area (especially beginning to intermediate gardeners like me). Having lived on the West Coast, where the Sunset Western Garden Book is the definitive gardener's bible, I looked high and low for an analog here in the South.
This is not it.
Don't get me wrong: this book has some good information and what's there is written in a highly readable, friendly voice.
But it is not a reference book, and it will not answer every gardening question you may have. And it may even leave you with some new questions after you try to make sense of some of the overly simple descriptions. And maybe that's OK, because it's not billed as that kind of a reference guide.
What is IS billed as, though, is a month-by-month guide to working in the garden. And it's here that it actually fails the most.
Organized into sections by different types of plants (bulbs, shrubs, trees, etc), this book is then further organized within each of those sections by month... ALPHABETICALLY! If that's not the craziest thing you've ever heard, just try to imagine actually using this book to try to understand what you need to do this weekend. You would need to flip through each section for each type of plant in your garden, and then flip around the counterintuitive listing (since when does April come before February, which comes before January?) to find the appropriate month. Lather, rinse, and repeat for each type of plant in your garden.
Why the author and publisher of this book didn't realize it would have made immeasurably more sense to group all the information together for each month and sort those months in CALENDAR order, I have no idea. But I'm here to tell you, it ain't worth it. Stick with the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0376039094/qid=1142637891/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-4895509-7335911?s=books&v=glance&n=283155">Southern Living Garden Book</a> and you'll be a lot less frustrated.
