Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead: Five Steps to the Drop-Dead Gorgeous Garden of Your Dreams [Hardcover]

Cassandra Danz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 1998

Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead shows you how to triumph over climate, garden pests, and the design clichés of the typical suburban landscape to make gardening an unrivaled entertainment.

Here's how any gardener, even with limited land, money, time, or experience, can create a glorious cottage garden.
Siting, enclosing, and "furnishing" a garden
Using the classical rules of proportion to balance your garden plan
Making the most of your garden depending upon its angle to the sun
Constructing a garden path, a rusticated arbor, or a wattle fence
Combining trees, shrubs, and perennials for abundance and bloom throughout the growing season
Using color as a unifying theme, accent, or expression of mood
Propagating shrubs and perennials simply and cheaply
Plus a special section on chemical-free pest control and deer-resistant plants.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Cassandra Danz takes her gardening seriously--she just doesn't discuss it that way. Her practical advice in Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead is liberally sprinkled with humor (when training a rose to climb, "Don't take guff from a plant."). Danz structures the garden from the big-picture perspective; for example, make your garden a separate "room" or rooms, and carefully develop the most stirring palettes of compatible colors. ("Don't plant magenta next to taxicab yellow!") She discusses the advantages and pitfalls of a single-color palette, such as writer Vita Sackville-West's white garden, and shows how to create illusions of greater space in a small yard. Other hints, such as "the old newspaper trick" of mulching, will make your gardening an Edenic delight.

From Library Journal

Finally, another practical, funny gardening guide from Danz, who won the Garden Writer's Association Quill and Trowel Award for her first book, Mrs. Greenthumbs : How I Turned a Boring Yard into a Glorious Garden and How You Can, Too (Crown, 1993). As in her columns and television appearances, Danz uses an easygoing, neighborly style that keeps the fun in gardening. With her typical brand of humor, she discusses garden design, touts the merits of perennials, gives tips on using color and bloom time to create a pleasing garden, and warns against plants that reproduce too freely. Anecdotes from her escapades in Great Britain are included, along with her comments on meeting gardening legend Christopher Lloyd. Her fans will undoubtedly be looking for this title. Others searching for gardening wisdom with a healthy dose of wit will enjoy it, too. Recommended for public libraries.?Bonnie Poquette, Appleton P.L., Wis.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 201 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (February 10, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517705540
• ISBN-13: 978-0517705544
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,593,888 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical gardening advice in a funny, entertaining book!, February 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead: Five Steps to the Drop-Dead Gorgeous Garden of Your Dreams (Paperback)

This is the best garden book I've seen yet, and my shelves are lined with them. There is very useful gardening information here, unlike many of the pretty but impractical British books. It's especially helpful if you live and garden in the Northeast as the author does. She even covers the deer problem and what kinds of things they really won't eat. This book is also very funny and hard to put down. It will be on and off my shelf a lot this Spring as I re-work my garden with her great tips!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Quite As Great as The First, April 22, 2000

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead: Five Steps to the Drop-Dead Gorgeous Garden of Your Dreams (Paperback)

I ordered this book because I laughed til I wept reading the first Mrs. Greenthumbs book, and at the same time dog-eared pages to refer back to for specific information. A perfect gardening reference (or would have been perfect, with the addition of good drawings)! This sequel, however, is Mrs. Greenthumbs Lite. Though the lovely drawings in this volume are welcome and helpful, they feel like padding added to a thin mixture. While the material is useful and clear there just isn't much of it. Also, the humor in this book definitely strains for its effects and ends up being more vulgar than genuinely amusing (not the case with Mrs. Greenthumbs I, which is hilarious and, yes, somewhat risqué).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I never knew gardening was so...saucy, August 7, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead: Five Steps to the Drop-Dead Gorgeous Garden of Your Dreams (Hardcover)

Cassandra Danz sprinkles funny anecdotes and asides over a foundation of good practical advice. This is a great book for busy, thrifty gardeners who want a fabulous garden, but don't have a legion of house servants. "Mrs. Greenthumbs" gave me many intriguing ideas on how to design a garden, like how to create "garden rooms" as well as using proportion and color schemes to advantage. She also brought what I *thought* was a placid, tranquil hobby to bodice-ripping, lusty life. Read it. You'll see.