Customer Reviews

Smart Garden Regional Guide: Southwest (American Horticultural Society Smartgarden Regional Garden Guides)

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Cutting straight to the point:

1- This book looks like a seed catalog or coffee table book. It's full of pictures with blurbs about the plants in a scattered layout. The pictures are very nice, but the blurbs contain very little information on care/culture of the plants beyond the basics. I have AHS guides from other areas (SouthEast, etc) that are nothing like this guide except for the similar cover design.

2- It is arranged horribly. The book is divided into a few-pages-long sections of plants with sub-headers describing what climate/conditions they like. It doesn't follow a logical flow for a reference guide. It seems more like someone's catalog to sell me plants and give me ideas rather than a reference tool.

If you're a novice looking for something a little more advanced to give you an idea of what plants you might want for your landscape...this is for you. That's about all I could recommend it for unless you want a good coffee table book. There's some nice pictures in there.

This book must be one of the worst examples of bad graphics. The whole book looks like a wedding invitation from a third-world country. As if someone took all the gardening information available mixed, stirred and splashed it all over the place, adding lots of red and black. In the plant section its impossible to match the pictures to the text because its not arranged in any logical order. A strange colorful frame decorates many of the pages making the headache-experience even more intense. Some of the pictures are bad reproductions from old books. Dorling kindersley really out-did themselves on this one.

Want a region-specific guide to growing which outlines successful plants and gardening techniques from California to Texas and Oklahoma? The American Horticultural Society doesn't just offer up another routine gardening guide: their Southwest Smart Garden Regional Guide is a complete instructional program in a single volume which teaches gardeners how to create a garden in tune with the environment and local growing conditions, using a coding system assigned to each plant for both hardiness zone and plant size. Packed with color photos on every page, The Southwest Smart Garden Regional Guide is the perfect choice, especially for novice Southwest area gardeners starting their first plot.

I like the colorful format of this book, it is also laid out well with each type of planting in a separate section. I had to plan a completely new garden in the San Diego county area, and I am not originally from here, so this book was a great resource, telling me about plants I had never even heard of and helped me choose the right plants for the soil, shaded areas and how to introduce plants which would attract Hummingbirds and for xeriscape purposes. Not as comprehensive as the Sunset West garden book, but definitely more colorful and works well together.