Product Description
Updated and revised.
This book is both a valuable reference and a practical how-to guide to hundreds of plant species suited for cultivation beneath a canopy of mature trees. Here is all the information needed to get started: design, plant selection, planting and maintenance. These principles can be applied anywhere in North America in any size garden, from large estate to a cramped city lot.
This revised edition of The Woodland Garden features new, beautiful color images throughout, a larger format and more text.
An authoritative guide for gardeners and landscape designers, this edition focuses on:
- Designing the woodland garden
- Building the woodland garden
- The canopy, plus a list of woodland trees
- The understory, plus a list of woodland shrubs
- Plants of the woodland floor
- Climbing plants
- Planting, pruning and maintenance
The authors list their favorite plants with detailed descriptions of the best woodland garden performers including lilies and rhododendrons. Practical information is provided for soil characteristics, adapting a property, working with a new site and converting an old garden. There are sections on fragrance, water, rocks, pathways, scale and unity, how to analyze a site and much more.
Helpful tips throughout offer useful advice gleaned from the authors' decades of collective experience: dealing with weeds and pests, preparing the land, watering, mulching and propagation.
(20041126)
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Not American Natives, 2008-05-12
I was interested in creating a native woodland. This book does not indicate which plants are native and which are imports and many of them are. There are even invasive plants mentioned with no warning. If you care about protecting our native population of plants from exotics that can out-compete them(and everyone should) then this is the wrong book! The sub title is "planting in harmony with nature". What a joke.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
Thorough but dull, 2004-05-08
This is an updated version of a book that first appeared in 1999. It contains a great deal of well organized information presented in an attractive format. While much of the information is based on experience in the Pacific Northwest, it has validity for other areas too.The writers are well-known and respected in the Pacific Northwest. They start by discussing the design of the woodland garden on various sites, and then offer ideas for building and developing the garden. This is followed by a chapter each on the canopy, understory, woodland floor and climbing plants. Each chapter concludes with plant lists. There follows a chapter on planting, pruning and maintenance and a list of the authors' favourite plants. There are pleasant colour photographs, black and white designs for gardens and sketches of rock placements.
The writers are knowledgeable and thorough but the writing tends to be dry and tedious to plough through. Other writers have addressed the topic in a much more readable style. I found no inspiration here - just text book-type info.
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
Impressions of "The Woodland Garden", 2001-04-04
This book focuses on the design and structure of woodland gardens. Content describes the layers of groundcover, upper story and middle layer. Extensive lists of appropriate plants with zone and cultivation information are provided and are very useful. I found the book a great help in thinking about my shady woodland area, and inspiring in terms of design ideas. The focus is on general principles of woodland design rather than giving diagrams to follow. There are some pictures of plants, but I would have preferred more pictures of general woodland scenes. I have read sections over & over and continue to find it enjoyable and useful.