Covers mixed garden design concepts, exploring color, texture, form, principles, and maintenance.

With more than 180,000 copies sold since its original publication, The Well-Tended Perennial Garden has proven itself to be one of the most useful tools a gardener can have. Now, in this expanded edition, there's even more to learn from and enjoy. This is the first, and still the most thorough, book to detail essential practices of perennial care such as deadheading, pinching, cutting back, thinning, disbudding, and deadleafing, all of which are thoroughly explained and illustrated. More than 200 new color photographs have been added to this revised edition, showing perennials in various border situations and providing images for each of the entries in the A-to-Z encyclopedia of important perennial species. In addition, there is a new 32-page journal section, in which you can enter details, notes, and observations about the requirements and performance of perennials in your own garden. Thousands of readers have commented that The Well-Tended Perennial Garden is one of the most useful and frequently consulted books in their gardening libraries. This new, expanded edition promises to be an even more effective ally in your quest to create a beautiful, healthy, well-maintained perennial garden.

The author of The Well-Tended Perennial Garden profiles fifty key plants that are perfect for a year-round garden, pest resistant, climate tolerant, cold hardy, and easy to cultivate and maintain, accompanied by useful gardening tips, advice, and hints based on the author's own gardening experience.

In this eloquent plea for compassion and respect for all species, journalist and gardener Nancy Lawson describes why and how to welcome wildlife to our backyards. Through engaging anecdotes and inspired advice, profiles of home gardeners throughout the country, and interviews with scientists and horticulturalists, Lawson applies the broader lessons of ecology to our own outdoor spaces. Detailed chapters address planting for wildlife by choosing native species; providing habitats that shelter baby animals, as well as birds, bees, and butterflies; creating safe zones in the garden; cohabiting with creatures often regarded as pests; letting nature be your garden designer; and encouraging natural processes and evolution in the garden. The Humane Gardener fills a unique niche in describing simple principles for both attracting wildlife and peacefully resolving conflicts with all the creatures that share our world.

“This practical guide is lush with clear, step-by-step advice.” —Real Simple Whether you are a new gardener or a green thumb, The Well-Tended Perennial Garden is here to help you successfully plan, plant, and tend your garden. This hardworking guide includes thorough details on the essential practices of perennial care—included deadheading, pinching, and thinning—along with growing information for specific species and cultivars, on-trend garden design advice, a monthly planting and maintenance schedule, and details on native plants and gardening for wildlife. The Well-Tended Perennial Garden will be your ally in the quest for a beautiful, well-maintained garden.

Subtitled, 12 Simple Steps to Creating Successful Gardens and Landscapes. There may be 12, but we all know they're not so simple; this guide clearly spells out how to think about a garden and how to make plans, beginning with a list of reasons people want gardens in the first place. Plastic comb binding. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

“Indispensable.” —The New York Times Book Review Piet Oudolf’s gardens—unique combinations of long-lived perennials and woody plants that are rich in texture and sophisticated in color—are breathtaking and have deep emotional resonance. With Planting, designers and home gardeners can recreate these plant-rich, beautiful gardens that support biodiversity and nourish the human spirit. An intimate knowledge of plants is essential to the success of modern landscape design, and Planting shares Oudolf’s considerable understanding of plant ecology, explaining how plants behave in different situations, what goes on underground, and which species make good neighbors. Extensive plant charts and planting plans will help you choose plants for their structure, color, and texture. A detailed directory shares details like each plant’s life expectancy, the persistence of its seedheads, and its propensity to self-seed.

Discover 27 truly lovely blocks featuring flowers, leaves, and spritely creatures of the garden such as squirrels and robins. You'll also find seven delightful quilt patterns that showcase these versatile blocks. Develop your skills with paper piecing, machine applique, and free-motion machine quilting Celebrate nature's abundance with color-splashed projects for spring, summer, winter, and fall View a fabulous photo gallery brimming with even more ideas for these extraordinary blocks

In this book, pioneering garden designers Henk Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf describe their special choice of ideal plants – perennials, bulbs, grasses, ferns and small shrubs. An ideal plant is one that is both beautiful and robust, performing reliably with very little input from the gardener. Complete growing information is provided for each plant along with advice on how to use it to best effect. Gerritsen and Oudolf have a genuinely innovative approach to gardening. Rather than striving for big, bold masses of colourful blooms that are vigorously pruned back as soon as they have finished flowering, the authors choose plants chiefly for their form - leaves, flower heads and stems included - which means they retain their natural beauty through all the seasons.

In a time of climate change and mass extinction, how we garden matters more than ever: “An outstanding and deeply passionate book.” —Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals Plenty of books tell home gardeners and professional landscape designers how to garden sustainably, what plants to use, and what resources to explore. Yet few examine why our urban wildlife gardens matter so much—not just for ourselves, but for the larger human and animal communities. Our landscapes push aside wildlife and in turn diminish our genetically programmed love for wildness. How can we get ourselves back into balance through gardens, to speak life's language and learn from other species? Benjamin Vogt addresses why we need a new garden ethic, and why we urgently need wildness in our daily lives—lives sequestered in buildings surrounded by monocultures of lawn and concrete that significantly harm our physical and mental health. He examines the psychological issues around climate change and mass extinction as a way to understand how we are short-circuiting our response to global crises, especially by not growing native plants in our gardens. Simply put, environmentalism is not political; it's social justice for all species marginalized today and for those facing extinction tomorrow. By thinking deeply and honestly about our built landscapes, we can create a compassionate activism that connects us more profoundly to nature and to one another.