Customer Reviews

The Woodland Garden: Planting in Harmony with Nature

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I was interested in creating a native woodland. This book does not indicate which plants are native and which are imports and many of them are. There are even invasive plants mentioned with no warning. If you care about protecting our native population of plants from exotics that can out-compete them(and everyone should) then this is the wrong book! The sub title is "planting in harmony with nature". What a joke.