Design in the Plant Collector's Garden: From Chaos to Beauty

by Roger Turner

Book Overview

All gardeners love plants but if you love them too much the chances are you will end up with a plant collection rather than a garden. Help is at hand from confirmed plantaholic and architect Roger... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0881926906
• ISBN13: 9780881926903
• Release Date: February 2005
• Publisher: Timber Press (OR)
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.9" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Not a complete horticultural course, but very helpful.

I have been gardening for more than twenty years. I have never taken a horticulture course or attended a master gardeners class. Basically, I garden all summer and read about gardening all winter. I definitely fall into the category of "Ooooo, that's lovely! Let me buy one!". It's true. I am a plant junkie, but it's the learning and experimenting that has given me so much pleasure over the years, and my gardens have greatly improved since reading this book. Yes, Mr. Turner does talk directly to those who collect a single group of plants: for instance, euphorbias (his own obsession), daylilies, roses, etc. However, his book was very helpful to me even though I am of the "one of everything school of collecting". For starters, though I have read many books and magazine articles on garden design, his book was the first that finally helped me to understand what the "bones" or "structure" of a garden are, and why they are so important. And he gives many examples in his book of how to take a collection of a single type of plant, say Heliopsis, and mix it into a variety of other plants, so that the collection is no longer like a coin collection, all lined up in rows for viewing, but an integral part of a beautiful whole. I think he did a fine job of teaching this concept. I just had to think in terms of plants that are similar to one another, rather than being of one species,(ie. Shastas, Rudbeckias, heliopsis, heleniums, chrysanthemums, etc.)and apply his same design principles to them. This being said, his book is not the one, complete, answer to all my questions on the subject of garden design. I can recommend several others that are excellent (beginning with anything by Pamela Harper, for example), but cannot say that I have yet run across that one "read it and you've got it" book. I have decided that garden design is probably a natural gift for the lucky artistic few, and a skill that must (but can) be learned, practiced, refined, and experienced over a period of time for the rest of us. To me, a good gardening book gives me a new, better, or expanded understanding of the knowledge that I may have acquired from another book, article, or speaker. So, I thought this was a very good book. I learned a great deal from it. I recommend it as one good piece of an enthustiastic, amateur gardener's education. P.S. If you want to be able to read books on gardening that go beyond the Sunset Series, you simply must learn latin names for plants. I have found that one good reference book that gives an exhaustive list for plants that grow and thrive in my climate (which, for me is the Southern Living Garden Book)is a critical companion to have available when I read other gardening books. I see the latin names of plants in the book, look them up in my reference, and then have a better idea of my chances of growing it successfully. The more I work this process, the more Latin names I know.

A book needed by amateurs stricken with the disease of gardening.

I am giving this book a full five stars because I have yet to find another to compare it to concerning this subject matter. Living in the heart of the midwestern United States, the typical British tome offers very little of any substance to me. In spite of the fact that the author is British, I feel the book has much to offer if one ignores some of the specific plants that are used as examples. Mr. Turner instead outlines the pitfalls of merely collecting plants. Quite simply, he admits that plant collectors will continue to collect. However, he encourages and outlines techniques to establish gardening goals other than just "MORE!". Essentially: If you are going to collect, (And you will.) do your collecting well. The often dreadful look of a collector's garden has long been in great need of discussion. This book does a wonderful job of broaching that subject.