Ultimate Container Garden [Paperback]

David Joyce (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2, 2000

Whether you have a city window ledge or a large well-stocked garden, you can use containers to enhance your outdoor space. This manual includes recipes and plans for over 30 container planting schemes. Step-by-step photographs show how to plant every kind of container, with tips on fixing and supporting heavy baskets and window boxes, decorating containers, training standards and topiary. A catalogue of more than 1000 plants is provided to enable the reader to choose successful colour combinations in every season.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Joyce is a celebrated garden writer and planting adviser who has lived and gardened in New Zealand, France and Hong Kong as well as in London and Suffolk. He has written many successful books on a range of gardening topics.

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: Frances Lincoln (March 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 071124961X
• ISBN-13: 978-0711249615
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,084,449 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Good Introduction. A bit British!, August 30, 2007

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ultimate Container Garden (Paperback)

`The Ultimate Container Garden' by David Joyce, under the imprimatur of Reader's Digest is the kind of book I always leapt to buy in the `good old days' before I started seriously reviewing books, and saw my share of `Complete...' this that and the other thing, rarely fulfilling its promise of covering all bases adequately. In spite of all that pessimism, this book has served me well, even going so far as to entice me to build not just one, but two of its wooden window boxes, which I did a good eight years ago, and with but a single new paint job since that time, the noble boxes have been serving me well. That alone has this book repaying my trust in buying it.
Like most `Complete' books, this one does too much in some areas and too little in others. Its four main sections are:
Versatile Containers gives a few very general notions less to cover the ground completely as to get you give you a pep talk to warm you up to the subject. This is done with very pretty pictures of very nice container plantings and some text on general suggestions. It is useful to note here that the author lives and works in London, and all the pictures are done of scenes from English gardens. So, unless you happen to live in an area which reproduces the climate of Devon or Hampshire, some of the models presented may be a bit of a stretch.
Successful Gardening in Containers is the section where the book really gets down to business and provides step by step procedures and techniques, including the plans for the aforementioned wooden planter. Here, the author covers just about every modality I can think of, including window boxes, hanging baskets, and water gardens. I'm especially fond of the section on using `Unusual and Recycled Containers'. The book draws outside the lines a bit when it also goes on to cover things such as pruning and topiaries, not strictly `container' topics.
Model Plantings may be the very best chapter, as it deals with that most mysterious subject of planting a grouping of plants in a container with varying looks and colors, to have the whole thing look simultaneously planned and random. One note is that the emphasis here tends to be on large to very large containers. There is little coverage on what to do with that 8 inch pot aunt Mildred gave you when she moved into an apartment.
Plants for Containers is the kind of chapter I always think is either inadequate or totally unnecessary. That is because of the dozens of great encyclopaedic tomes on plants available now. The section is in encyclopedia form, giving a photograph of about ¼ of the plants, and one or two paragraphs on each, with the plant's botanical family, genus, and species name(s) and the US zones in which they thrive. If you have no other books on flowers, and you have no interest in acquiring more, this may be useful, but for the real plant hobbiest, the three paragraphs on Clematis are not much use. The only really valuable thing here is the kind of potting mix to use to put Clematis in a container. There is nothing on the dozens of varieties of Clematis and nothing on the fact that the genus likes cool feet, planting it with other plants which have shading foliage.
Still, this is a better than average book on the subject, and if you want and needc