Coastal gardeners throughout the United States will benefit from the advice in this practical, inspirational, and illustrated book on Mediterranean gardening, which is beautiful year-round.

Now that growing your own food is back in fashion — for health, financial, and environmental reasons — Mariano Bueno gives full practical details on how to grow vegetables alongside fruit trees and a variety of aromatic, medicinal and ornamental plants and herbs. He gives the individual requirements of common garden vegetables and popular fruit trees and provides a calendar that describes how to care for the kitchen garden through the gardening year. Explaining how to meet the particular challenges of growing edible plants in a hot, dry climate, with advice on matters such as irrigation, the book will be useful for those who live in a Mediterranean area or find themselves gardening in ever-hotter, dry climates. But it is also abundant in expertise on gardening in other climatic conditions, too, and is available here to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

You can create a truly beautiful garden using exciting and exotic plants, yet at the same time eliminate the need for extra water and reduce the maintenance required. Your garden will be lush, full of colour and interest all year round, and rather than constantly weeding, watering and working, you can relax in your own Mediterranean haven. Book jacket

A large-format, beautifully illustrated, complete guide to gardening in a California and Mediterraean-like climates, defined as ones in which winters are wet and summers are bone dry.

Mediterranean garrigue landscapes are extraordinarily beautiful: alternating mounds of silver and green, textured leaves, flashes of colour and intoxicating scents combine to delight the senses and rival any cultivated garden with half the work. This book offers inspiration and expert advice on growing the plants and adopting a new more natural way of gardening. Mediterranean plants are diverse and adapted to a wide range of environments and weather conditions. They are of course ideally suited to regions which experience long periods of seasonal drought but many will also withstand periods of high rainfall and extreme cold making this book essential reading for temperate-zone gardeners seeking the Mediterranean look. Some understanding of plant ecology is essential for success and Filippi shares his expert knowledge acquired from decades of research. How a plant interacts with its environment, other plants, and other living things indicates what it needs to flourish in a garden setting.

Making a garden that can withstand summer drought without irrigation is the dream of many who wish to garden in harmony with the environment. In this classic work on gardening in dry climates, first published in 2008, Olivier Filippi offers practical advice to achieve this goal based on his, and his wife Clara's, experience of working with Mediterranean-region plants for more than 30 years. The first part of the book examines the behavior of plants that face drought in their natural habitat. What is drought and how do plants manage to survive when little water is available? The second part is concerned with gardening techniques in a dry climate. How do you prepare the soil, when do you plant, and how do you maintain a dry garden? The third and longest part describes in detail no less than 500 rewarding plants that are well-adapted to dry gardens, each classified by a unique dry resistance code. The Dry Gardening Handbook is essential reading for gardeners who live in one of the world's Mediterranean climate zones and will also be of interest to gardeners in areas where drought is becoming a recurring problem.

A Colonial Williamsburg garden historian outlines traditional methods for planting and tending 50 different kinds of vegetables, profiling such 18th-century utilities as shelter paper and fermented manure while sharing complementary weather-watching guidelines, organic techniques and seed-saving advice.

Gardening for drought and heat the Mediterranean way. This book reveals the secrets of gardening with a low watering regime, with techniques showing how you can create the ideal garden for living in, whatever the weather. It shows how to create a garden that is full of radiance and scent, with vivid flowers and foliage, and aromatic herbs - the perfect outdoor living room. It offers an advice on making a garden that is beautiful through every season, whatever the climate, so that it can survive through the driest summers, and yet can cope with damp, rain and even frost. It includes photographs of inspirational scenes from dry and Mediterranean gardens. Gardening in today's ever hotter and drier conditions need not be a barrier to enjoyment, success and creativity. The low-water no-water method is not for the faint-hearted, but for those who like their plants spirited and their flower beds exuberant. This book shows how to use Mediterranean plants for a glorious garden that will thrive in a dry climate. There are instructions for planting evergreens with robust, aromatic folliage, as well as low-maintenance shrubs that need no staking, watering, feeding or pruning. The book shows how tough love, not pampering, pays off, giving you a drought-proof and aromatic paradise in your own plot.

Mediterranean gardening offers a way of living in harmony with the earth without contrived effects or heavy spending. Born of long human experience on the land, it is frugal and fruitful, serves many purposes and gives many pleasures, year-round. Today, it adapts easily to our growing ecological awareness, to individual creativity and community sharing. Above all, it perpetuates a long-standing partnership between human beings and their environment, tested in Mediterranean countries for millennia. Mediterranean cooking grew from peasant roots but has become fashionable today all over the world without loss of local diversity. More than a mere trend, it has been widely adopted because of its underlying, enduring practices: it is seasonal, local, healthy and flavourful, economical but capable of great refinement. Mediterranean gardening has much the same base and similar benefits. Like the cuisine, Mediterranean gardening offers an approach that can be adapted to all climates and budgets, for better, sustainable living in harmony with the environment.