Customer Reviews

Ortho's All About Shrubs and Hedges (Ortho's All About Gardening)

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

 

 

This book, along with Susan Roth's Four-Season Landscapes convinced me to use shrubs for the backbone of my garden, and to add perennials for sparkle. Has good lists to help in shrub selection: for esample, Shrubs for Fall Color, Shrubs with Showy Leaves, etc. Half the book, 45 pages, is a shrub selection guide with color photos, the necessary factual info, and recommended cultivars. Not a coffee table book, but one to refer to again and again. Ortho's Perennial book is good, too.

I found the book is separated into 3 sections. The First third is about landscaping techniques for various locations of your property, the second third is basic care, pruning, planting, and transplanting techniques, and the last third is a photo gallery of shrubs along with their names, and care instructions. Overall its a great starter book and I find myself carrying this book with me to all the nurseries to use as reference. However, this book is thin and can only cover a limited amount of shrubs. I would have seperated the last third from the first two and made 2 books, once you read the landscaping and planting sections the only reason you hold this book is for the photo gallery. For a more complete photo reference I would recommend Dirr's Hardy Tree and Shrubs book, and use the Ortho book as a supplement.

This book will not only show you how to plan a nice garden, but also takes a good look at 95% of the most popular shrubs you would ever want for your garden. If you're a beginner, be cautioned that it doesn't tell you upfront whether or not each plant is evergreen, semi-evergreen or deciduous, which is very important, though it generally will tell you if the plant IS evergreen; my complaint is that they should have listed this feature in the header for each plant. They don't spend as much time as I'd like on each shrub and I'd like to see at least 2 photos of each shrub, but NOBODY does that anyway and they still do a good job. This book is valuable to your shrub planning, so I'd buy this and Taylor's 50 Best Shrubs and you'll have the 2 books you need. Also, they should have added a USDA zone map.

Detailed review of shrubs and trees for the yard. Suggested selection by geographical section of the country. Not all inclusive but pretty complete. Hard to find in stores.

This book has a good description of the most popular shrubs. It is very similar in format to the other Ortho books.

Should be entitled "a little something about shrubs". It certainly is not "all" about shrubs.