Dream Plants for the Natural Garden: Over 1,200 Beautiful and Reliable Plants for a Natural Garden - Softcover

Oudolf, Piet; Gerritsen, Henk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0711234620 ISBN 13: 9780711234628

Publisher: Frances Lincoln, 2013

Synopsis

Join two of the world’s most influential garden designers, Piet Oudolf and Henk Gerritsen, as they describe their ideal perennials, bulbs, grasses, ferns and small shrubs for your natural garden. This comprehensive compendium classifies these 1200 plants according to their behaviour, strengths and uses.

An ideal plant is one that is both beautiful and robust, performing reliably with very little input from the gardener – and without artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Rather than striving for big, bold masses of colourful blooms that are vigorously pruned back as soon as they have finished flowering, their innovative approach to gardening involves choosing plants chiefly for their form – leaves, flower heads and stems included – which means they retain their natural beauty through all the seasons. Find within:

• 1200 beautiful and reliable plants used by top garden designers
• Full descriptions and growing instructions
• Unique easy-to-follow classification according to growing behaviour and use in the garden
• Natural gardening, without artificial fertilizers or pesticides
• More than 250 full-colour photographs

With these plants and expert advice, create a garden that will thrive with the life of the insects and birds it welcomes.

About this title

Review:

Gardeners are moving away from tidy borders and neat velvet lawns to more expressive areas of plants grown within a natural movement of design. Who better to explain how to do this than the Dutch international garden designers, Henk Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf. Dream Plants for the Natural Garden suggests 1,200 plant species which they consider practical for the average garden. Each is give its Latin and common name with a brief description and notes of favourable conditions and flowering period.

The book covers perennials, bulbs, grasses, ferns and small shrubs, all of which the authors believe will continue growing, flowering and seeding for many years There are three main sections covering tough (perennials, grasses, ferns, bulbs and shrubs), playful (self-seeding perennials, biennials and annuals) and troublesome plants (invasive, capricious and demanding), explaining how to deal with them. Piet Oudolf has nurseries near Arnheim where he is practised in choosing plants that are easy to maintain and mainly disease resistant. Both he and Henk Gerritsen took many of the photographs that illustrate the text.

Dream Plants for the Natural Garden is an ideal reference book. Use some of the ideas to enliven your own garden or create an imaginative new one. --Judy Wyles

Review:

'A Bible for those interested in turning their garden into a naturalistic haven.'

About this edition

• Publisher: Frances Lincoln
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0711234620
• ISBN 13: 9780711234628
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144