Customer Reviews

Ultimate Container Garden

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`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