| | Plant Guides and catalogues, books about plant selection and care |
Looking for plant guides and catalogues, or books about plant selection and care? Ever wandered around a garden centre, looking for the perfect plant to fill that space in your garden? Confusing isn't it.
The books on this page are all designed to help you to select the perfect plant: how big, what colour, how disease-resistant, how much work it will be.
If you are looking for books on a particular plant or flower, use the pulldown menu on the top right.
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Every gardener wants to create the perfect garden. However, it is not always easy to know what to plant beside it, or how to display it to its best advantage. Who can remember all the combinations of colour, texture, size, height, growing conditions... This Encyclopaedia is the most comprehensive, detailed and well-illustrated book of combinations around.
It features more than 1000 individual plants in combination with other plants, showing over 4000 imaginative and visually effective displays, providing detailed information about which plants go best together according to location, soil type, climatic and seasonal considerations. Separate chapters are devoted to shrubs, small trees, roses, climbers, perennials, annuals and bulbs. The only problem really is that this book makes you want to go out and purchase the ingredients!
An essential addition to the keen gardener's collection.
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Subtitled 'A complete guide to dark plants' this book is a very useful, very
cool addition to the plant library. Forget Sissinghurst, with its 'oh so
passé' white garden, Karen Platt provides the gardener with everything he or
she needs to make a dark garden.
Black Magic kicks off with an overview on mood setting, current trends and
partnerships, then works its way through obvious combinations, eg. Black and
silver, black and gold, before embarking on a comprehensive and
well-illustrated A-Z of plant profiles.
Black vegetables, trees, climbers and succulents are dealt with, before the
book rounds off with an overview of the year, ensuring a good selection of
dark plants for every season.
A very clever idea, very romantic, and well executed. This book provides
food for thought and ideas to experiment and enhance your garden.
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Published in association with the RHS, this guide includes addresses, telephone and fax numbers, email, web addresses, opening hours and location maps of where to buy plants. The book lists more than 70,000 plants, including over 4000 new plants not previously listed. You may not need 70,000, but for all us anoraks out there, this seems to be the bees' knees.
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After a brief skim through the botany - why are plants silver, why are plants hairy - the meat of this book lies in the plant directory, a well-illustrated A-Z.
Karen Platt has previously published Black Magic and Gold Fever, and this book follows in the path trodden by the earlier volumes. She provides separate sections on silvery bark, silvery grasses, silvery flowers…
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The sister volume to Black Magic & Purple Passion, Gold Fever does the same
thing for over 1,350 golden plants.
Particularly useful as a focal point, or to brighten a shady spot, gold can
be pure, acid, mellow or sunshine, according to Platt. It can also be
available all year round.
After an overview on mood setting and combinations, Gold Fever embarks on a
comprehensive and well-illustrated A-Z of plant profiles.
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This book is a real labour of love. Karen Platt has hunted down nearly 400 seed companies, stocking over 40,000 seeds including more than 9,000 vegetables. It ranges from the large familiar companies such as Thompson and Morgan, through to the smaller more specialised companies.
Meticulously, if slightly eccentrically organised (small criticisms include listing companies under e.g. The Borneo Collection is listed under T for the rather than under B for Borneo, which is irritating in an alphabetical directory), The Seed Search is a perfect guide for specialist seed sowers trying to track down elusive varieties of a particular seed. To give you some idea of the scale of this book, there are six columns of different varieties of onions, that is some 350 different kinds of onion seed alone!
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There is something irresistible about a Top 100, whether it is one hundred advertisements, one hundred romantic moments on screen, or - as in this case - the top one hundred plants.
Rachel de Thame has lined up most of the usual suspects, and - produced a very useful list! Faced with the RHS Dictionary of all plants ever, most of us are completely daunted. Rachel de Thame's book is the opposite: undaunting and accessible.
De Thame has divided her book into the following categories: plants for sunny, dry sites, autumn leaf colour, shade-loving perennials, transparent plant, roses of scent, trees for small gardens, flowers with sultry colour, climbers for a shady wall, decorative herbs, annuals and biennials, grasses and winter-flowering shrubs.
Go out and buy three plants from each section and your garden will be fab. We couldn't spot a dud plant amongst her recommendations.
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The Mediterranean climate, with its long warm summers and cool, wet winters, is ideal for growing a wide range of exciting plants, from the cool temperate to the tropical regions of the word - and with global warming, increasingly this style of gardening is applicable to the UK. Graham Payne was Head Gardener at Jesus College Cambridge, and has now retired to southern Europe where he practises what he preaches. The core of the book is a listing of over a thousand suitable plants, with cultivation tips, (although little information on propagation).
An excellent section on 'Plants for a Purpose' provides a handy reference guide to selection, for instance, for climbers and wall shrubs, plants for dry shade, etc. There is also a quick guide to Latin name meanings which will help the general reader to come to terms with tricky terminology - especially useful if buying plants in a foreign language.
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Part of the 'Gardens by Design' series published by The National Trust, these are compact, well-designed books. Most of the tried and tested plants we now grow in our gardens are species that orginated in other parts of the world, brought back as seeds and plants by explorers to enhance our home gardens.
This book presents a somewhat arbitrary selection of "the very best" of such plants from all over the world, now growing at National Trust properties in the British Isles - and in many of our own gardens. Examples include Ceanothus, Campanula, Camellia, Cyclamen, Magnolia and Hollyhocks. Each of the forty plants has a little map showing where it came from (a little tricky when some of them originate from several countries), a full page photograph and a couple of smaller illustrations showing them in situ, usually in a National Trust property. Occasionally the author tells us a little about their history or the explorer who brought them back to the UK, but most of the information deals with description, different varieties and tips for cultivation and siting.
The book slightly falls between two stools, trying to combine history, geography and horticulture, but it does neatly illustrate what a geographically diverse collection of plants have now become standard issue in our gardens, and reminds us to be amazed at the diversity and beauty of plants we take for granted. A nice gift.
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That's it for this category. Click here to suggest a book on selecting plants and we'll do our best to review it.
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