Customer Reviews

Timber Press Pocket Guide to Bamboos (Timber Press Pocket Guides)

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

 

 

This wonderful guide book has 100's of beautiful images and concise informative descriptions to many excellent tropical and temperate garden bamboos available today. It will help you decide which bamboos will grow and thrive in your garden zone and where to find them at the local bamboo nursery or through mail order. The pocket guide is for the average gardener who may not have grown bamboo before and for the collector who can't get enough. The author has listed several species very new and rare to cultivation along with the more readily available common types. The guide is a "must have" for anyone who loves bamboo and has an interest in trying to grow this amazing and ancient plant. For the enthusiast an excellent companion book is the author's previous release "Bamboo for Gardens."

A good book thankfully written by an American. Many of the books about bamboo are very good, but sadly written by English authors about how bamboo performs in Great Britain. That's not usually very helpful for American bamboo enthusiasts. Not many parts of the US have a similar climate to the one found in Great Britain. This book is written about bamboo performance in the US. It has pictures of bamboo taken in the US and it is very concise. I liked it a lot and found it to be very helpful!

A concise and well organized reference book. Good information mainly for beginners but also useful to knowledgeable growers as well.

This is really just a listing of the qualities of different bamboos, with very little (12 pages) about cultivation. What was there was helpful, but for someone interested in growing bamboo for the first time in difficult conditions, it is mostly a waste. I'm an experienced gardener and I was looking for a book about growing bamboo.
I found it extremely unhelpful that the individual descriptions say nothing about care, except to mention the growing zone. Worst of all, there are NO common names in the index, and very few in the book. So if you are shopping for bamboos that you have seen and that were described only in common names, you have to have the book in one hand and the computer in the other. And once you are on the computer, you don't really need the book, do you?
I think it would be great as a field guide, or for experts in bamboo. But it was almost useless as a choosing, planting, or growing guide for a beginner in the field.