The Woodland Garden: Planting in Harmony with Nature [Paperback]

R. Roy Forster (Author), Alex M. Downie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 6, 2004

Updated and revised.

This book is both a valuable reference and a practical how-to guide to hundreds of plant species suited for cultivation beneath a canopy of mature trees. Here is all the information needed to get started: design, plant selection, planting and maintenance. These principles can be applied anywhere in North America in any size garden, from large estate to a cramped city lot.

This revised edition of The Woodland Garden features new, beautiful color images throughout, a larger format and more text.

An authoritative guide for gardeners and landscape designers, this edition focuses on:

• Designing the woodland garden
• Building the woodland garden
• The canopy, plus a list of woodland trees
• The understory, plus a list of woodland shrubs
• Plants of the woodland floor
• Climbing plants
• Planting, pruning and maintenance

The authors list their favorite plants with detailed descriptions of the best woodland garden performers including lilies and rhododendrons. Practical information is provided for soil characteristics, adapting a property, working with a new site and converting an old garden. There are sections on fragrance, water, rocks, pathways, scale and unity, how to analyze a site and much more.

Helpful tips throughout offer useful advice gleaned from the authors' decades of collective experience: dealing with weeds and pests, preparing the land, watering, mulching and propagation.

(20080404)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Informative, this is a very attractive book. Anyone who is interested in woodland gardens will want to consult this work. (January Adams American Reference Books Annual, Volume 36 2005)

Easy, step-by-step methods to create natural woodland areas. (Megan Meirs Tulsa World 20040417)

An endless number of books discuss this topic, but few capture Forster and Downie's vision of balance and harmony. (Mary Ann Fink St Louis Post-Dispatch 200405)

A valuable reference and a practical how-to guide to hundreds of plant species suited for cultivation beneath a canopy. (Michigan Gardener )

A gorgeous book sure to inspire... a book free of formal rules but full of naturalistic beauty. (Marianne Binetti Seattle Post-Intelligencer )

Will be cherished by any gardener with a wooded property. (Margaret C. Crooks Asbury Park Press )

Inspirational guidance as well as the basics... a good primer for wannabe woodland folk. (Maureen McCarthy Minneapolis Star Tribune )

This is a complete source book to transform a garden, or to construct and cultivate a new woodland area. (LandscapeOnline.com (Landscape Development Industr )

About the Author

Roy Forster is a master gardener who helped guide the creation of VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia, a world-recognized prime example of woodland gardening.

Alex Downie is curator of the Bloedel Conservatory in Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Park, also a public garden known worldwide.

(20050914)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Firefly Books; Revised edition (March 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1552977447
• ISBN-13: 978-1552977446
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 9.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,148,400 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Impressions of "The Woodland Garden", April 4, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Woodland Garden: Planting in Harmony with Nature (Paperback)

This book focuses on the design and structure of woodland gardens. Content describes the layers of groundcover, upper story and middle layer. Extensive lists of appropriate plants with zone and cultivation information are provided and are very useful. I found the book a great help in thinking about my shady woodland area, and inspiring in terms of design ideas. The focus is on general principles of woodland design rather than giving diagrams to follow. There are some pictures of plants, but I would have preferred more pictures of general woodland scenes. I have read sections over & over and continue to find it enjoyable and useful.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Thorough but dull, May 8, 2004

By 

Valerie Adolph "Coast Journal" (Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Woodland Garden: Planting in Harmony with Nature (Paperback)

This is an updated version of a book that first appeared in 1999. It contains a great deal of well organized information presented in an attractive format. While much of the information is based on experience in the Pacific Northwest, it has validity for other areas too.

The writers are well-known and respected in the Pacific Northwest. They start by discussing the design of the woodland garden on various sites, and then offer ideas for building and developing the garden. This is followed by a chapter each on the canopy, understory, woodland floor and climbing plants. Each chapter concludes with plant lists. There follows a chapter on planting, pruning and maintenance and a list of the authors' favourite plants. There are pleasant colour photographs, black and white designs for gardens and sketches of rock placements.

The writers are knowledgeable and thorough but the writing tends to be dry and tedious to plough through. Other writers have addressed the topic in a much more readable style. I found no inspiration here - just text book-type info.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A specialty resource, April 10, 2009

By 

Amanda Gillock "Amanda Gillock" (Evanston, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Woodland Garden: Planting in Harmony with Nature (Hardcover)

An excellent book for someone not interested in a completely native shade garden, or for whom a completely native garden is impractical. The sections of this book I use most frequently are the plant lists. The authors split plants into groups based on where they occur in nature. There are sections for canopy trees, understory trees and shrubs, and plants for the woodland floor. Plants are listed alphabetically by botanical name. The reader is provided with a line of information giving common name, general size, minimum zone, and some brief cultural notes.

As another reviewer noted, the authors do *not* discriminate between natives and non-natives. A few invasive plants do sneak in, but only because they are useful in areas of the country where they are not invasive. This is the case all over the US; different plants succeed the proper amount in different areas. Just do a little bit of research on any plant you're thinking of planting and you'll be fine. The following link provides lists of federal noxious weeds for each state:

http://plants.usda.gov/java/noxComposite

I find this book very useful indeed, but I can't give it five stars for a couple reasons. Apparently the authors use west-coast hardiness, so there are some plants that will thrive in the west coast climate, but wither in the midwest or on the east coast. A small number of the hardiness zones listed are therefore off for most of the country.

In addition, the actual text is in fact dry and somewhat mundane for the actual intent of the book. The culture notes will be a bore for the type of people who will find this book helpful, but the design sections are intriguing. The authors mostly describe woodland gardens in terms of their natural states and sections (canopy, understory and floor as mentioned earlier). There are several diagrams depicting before and after property plans, and black and white sketches of sample landscapes.

All in all, this book will be a useful resource for someone who needs information on a more diverse array of shade plants than most native-only books in the US provide. It is not a primary resource, but a supplementary one. If you have need of it and are willing to drop the cash for it, it will serve you well.