Perennials All Season : Planning and Planting an Ever-Blooming Garden
An award-winning gardening expert shares his secrets to season-long splendorEvery gardener knows the quest to create a brilliant, fragrant, ever-blooming garden can be all consuming. You secretly long to be the envy of the neighborhood, with wonderfully crowded beds full of vibrant, dazzling flowers gracing your home from the first spring flush through the last fall leaf. Yet no matter how many specialist nurseries you visit or plant catalogs you pore over looking for just the right combination of colors and shapes, the elusive perennial garden that blooms all season long remains just out of reach.The trouble, according to gardening expert Douglas Green, is that you're looking for the answers in all the wrong places. The secrets to a beautiful garden all year round are found in your garden's design, plant selection, and arrangement . . . and in these gorgeously illustrated pages.InPerennials All Season, Green has combined all the tips of the trade into a remarkably simple design system that will allow any gardener, novice or master, to conceive and maintain an uninterrupted display of color and fragrance all season long. Follow his fun, down-to-earth guidelines and expand the flowering range of any garden. You'll learn how to lay a perennial bed for optimum lushness, select plants that will complement each other's flowering cycle, and position plants according to bloom time, color, and form.All the techniques the professionals use to develop stunning displays are covered in this comprehensive how-to, including foolproof formulas for determining proper bed and border proportions, visual tricks that de-emphasize unsightly nonflowering areas, and the ingenious employment of an everyday garden hose to simplify the layout process. You'll discover how to choose a focal point--fountain, plant, or birdbath--for your garden and design around it, as well as how to incorporate a backdrop, whether a brick wall or a backyard pond.Complete with up-to-date information on high-performing plants, newer varieties, and outstanding foliage, this guide is an essential gardening tool. Special features include:A comprehensive plant selection guide, uniquely arranged by seasonMore than three hundred exquisitely detailed photographs of plants, plant combinations, and garden settingsDetailed drawings help illustrate the instructionsSpecific growing information on bloom time, height, color, sun requirements, and soil conditions for thousands of individual varietiesA chapter specifically dedicated to color-theory applicationsPerennial pointers from the 2001 Garden Writers of America Award winnerEven if you've never put spade to dirt, this remarkably simple and refreshingly down-to-earth approach to season-long gardening provides the tools necessary to create an ever-blooming garden. Employ the insider tips shared by award-winning gardening expert Douglas Green and enjoy fragrant flower beds and brilliant borders from the first spring warmth through the cool days of fall."To keep myself happy and sane in an increasingly busy world, I made a garden that is constantly in glorious bloom and that speaks to me all season long. I was able to do this in my own garden because of the design and plant choices I made and I have to confess I do revel in its glory. My dream of a garden that is ever in bloom has become a reality."--Douglas Green