Customer Reviews

Rock Garden Plants: A Color Encyclopedia

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One of the most difficult parts of selecting rock garden plants is anticipating what they will look like in one's own rock garden. The pictures and descriptions in Baldassare Mineo's book are extraordinarily accurate, interesting and authoritative. We've seen Mineo's thrilling gardens and know that he understands his subject from the scree up! This book will become a classic.

Clearly a work of long effort and love, this magnificent volume shows what'you've always wanted to grow in your rock garden'...including some very rare, very astonishing plants. The pics are truly beautiful and show the plants as well as the flowers. The only thing it seems to lack is a discussion of some of the finer points of culture of some of these gems, but then again this isn't purely a book about rock garden culture. For that, look for Linc Foster's Rock Gardening or Reginald Farrer's classic The English Rock Garden.

There is a rock garden plant for everyone and many of them are represented in this catalog, uh, I mean book. It is not a catalog because there is no certainty that you will ever be able to acquire, much less keep and grow, the particular plant that you love at first sight in this book.

Since alpines are found all over the world and represent an assortment of ecological communities there is not a classifiable and finite family of plants. In this book you will constantly feel that you are only skimming the surface of a much much larger subject. There is barely enough information to help you keep the plant alive until you do learn it better. There are thumbnail images with thumbnail descriptions. Like I said, it is a glossy availability list. Only they are not necessarily available.

But they are so cute! All that is needed is a properly situated shelf with a few artistic pots and you too can nurture a tiny corner of paradise. It scales up from there indefinitely, until the problem is bringing your face close enough to fully appreciate each plant. Well, then there is the problem of keeping them alive. You are the artisan of rocks and gravel. These plants are your fragile gems.