Product Description

All gardeners love plants but if you love them too much the chances are you will end up with a plant collection rather than a garden. Help is at hand from confirmed plantaholic and architect Roger Turner, who describes how to indulge a passion for collecting plants without forfeiting the joys of a coherent, well-designed garden. Happily, the book prescribes little need to curb the excesses of plant addiction but simply recommends ways of focusing it to the advantage of all who share or visit your garden. Good collections need to be displayed well so that you can see them properly. The first part of the book looks at the structure of the garden as a whole, the balance of 'empty space' to 'planted space', the use of framing devices, and the value of paths in providing routes around the garden. At the heart of the book is a large section on plants that proposes ideas and solutions for making gardens with different types of plant collections. Here you will find schemes for displaying collections of trees from small groups to full-scale arboreta; recommendations for single-genus collections that look well planted together in one bed; and the ideal 'space-holder' plants that cover bare earth before prize bulbs emerge. Over 200 eye-catching and informative photographs highlight successful planting methods and illustrate the rewards to be gained from finding the perfect setting for a treasured plant. Plant enthusiasts, collectors and gardeners everywhere will unite in their enthusiasm for this practical book that provides the key to making beautiful gardens while keeping the spotlight on the plants.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #776106 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From Booklist
Every garden-design manual devotes some space to the problem of collectors bent upon having at least one specimen of every trendy plant that comes along. Architect and landscape designer Turner has both a trained eye and voracious regard for exceptional flora and, thus, is perfectly suited to instructing gardeners on how to create a highly satisfying layout that incorporates a vivifying plant palette. From gatherings of species in a single genus to diverse collections, Turner points out the challenges involved in bringing together a jumble of plants to form a coherent garden vision. Guiding readers in how to achieve maximum impact, Turner discusses the characteristics and structure of perennials and climbers, shrubs and bulbs, and grasses and ferns. Design strategies, advice on tree selection, and a sophisticated overview taking in various types of flower borders should give much food for thought. And the beautiful illustrations promise endless inspiration. Alice Joyce
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Roger Turner trained as an architect and now works as a landscape designer. He is a knowledgeable plantsman, active in the Hardy Plant Society and founding member of the Gloucestershire group of the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens (NCCPG). Author of the monograph, Euphorbias: A Gardener's Guide, Roger Turner also wrote Better Garden Design and Capability Brown. He contributes to a number of journals and magazines including Hortus and The English Garden, and lectures on a wide range of subjects.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The answer is shrubs, said the bold chapter heading in one of the first gardening books I ever read, and at first glance it does seem that shrubs have a lot to offer. However, after many years as a gardener I am not at all convinced they are the all-purpose, work-free, and colour-full answer to all gardening problems that is sometimes claimed. It's true that shrubs need comparatively little attention, especially when they are first planted. But the reality is that many of them just go on getting bigger and bigger, and this can end up being a nuisance where space is limited. Maybe I wanted a large shrub, but on the other hand, maybe I didn't — it's easy to buy and plant first, without realizing that your neat-looking, container-grown shrub is a cuckoo in the nest that eventually wants to be eight feet tall and ten feet across (2.5 m and 3 m). Or maybe double that, in the case of Rosa xanthina var. hugonis — judging from the one at Kew.

Size is the main issue that I have with shrubs: many of them are simply too large for the average garden. Their relentless growth means that when they are planted with other kinds of plants they turn out to be remarkably antisocial. They surreptitiously squeeze out neighbouring perennials and bulbs, until they die quietly due to lack of light or starvation beneath the shrub's ever-extending branches. Usually this is not the shrub's fault, but the gardener's, who planted the perennials too close to the shrub in the first place.

A related problem is that many shrubs are not particularly floriferous for their size, and may also have a relatively short flowering season. Shrubby honeysuckles, for instance, come into this category — or, think of any of those winter- or early spring-flowering viburnurns. In one of the coldest months of the year, when nobody is out in the garden, you get a spattering of deliciously scented but very small flowers. And the rest of the year you get leaves: a rounded mass of undistinguished foliage approximately eight feet high and six feet across (2.4 m and 1.8 m). In a large garden or public park this may be fine, but for my money a shrub like this doesn't pull its weight in the garden.

Shrub gardens, therefore, are either large gardens, or they are labour-saving and not-very-exciting gardens. However, shrubs are only labour-saving if they are planted at the right spacings in the first place, and sadly it isn't very easy to discover how big your plant is going to grow. Even the best books tend to be coy on the subject. It all depends, is what they will tell you. This is true, but unhelpful. Hillier's Manual describes shrubs as large, medium, small, dwarf, or prostrate, which is better than nothing. But if the eventual size of a shrub is said to be somewhere between five and ten feet (1.5 and 3 m) high and the same across, this actually means that in terms of mass the largest possible specimen can be 800 per cent larger than the smallest.

There are relatively few shrubby genera that would inspire enough enthusiasm to lure the plant lover into collecting them. Shrub collections are fine for an institution, such as the garden of a horticultural college or a botanic garden, but are likely to have less appeal in the private garden. Roses are obviously the exception — they are in a class of their own. Then for gardeners on acid soil, rhododendrons and azaleas are a very tempting option. But apart from that there are very few shrubs, despite their various individual attractions, that one would save up and buy a field for. A desire to create a small arboretum is not unknown, but the ambition to plant an extra-large shrubbery seems more-or-less unheard of.

A collection of shrubs all of a single genus (or of varieties of just one species) will tend to highlight the issue of value in relation to size. Because all the shrubs in question will be related to one another, the likelihood is that they will all be fairly similar in form, and flower at more or less the same time of year. This will be fine when they are all in bloom, and hopefully there will be a dazzling display of colour in the garden. But it also means that for the rest of the year there will necessarily be a large blank area where nothing in particular is happening.

This is partly a question of scale. At Kew there are several large beds devoted to lilacs, which are attractive and of interest at lilac time. During the other eleven-and-a-bit months of the year you don't really notice that anything is amiss, partly because they are not beside a main path, but mainly because they take up such a small part of Kew as a whole — a mere flea bite compared with the 300-acre site. But in a smaller garden, a lilac collection would represent a much higher proportion of the whole, and for this to be "dead" for eleven months would hardly be acceptable. In fact there's a long list of shrubs that aren't going to look their best placed all together in a collection: Philadelphus, Weigela, or Lonicera, for example, are likely to look exceedingly dreary when out of bloom, and need to have other contrasting plants mixed in with them. Alternatively the collection could be dotted around the whole site. This may be less convenient if you want to compare one with another, but will be better in terms of garden effect.

Of all single-genus collections, the rose garden must be the most frequently seen and also the one with the longest and most celebrated history. This is not surprising, bearing in mind the charms of roses. However, considering that there are thousands of different cultivars available, a rose collection aspiring to completeness could be a possibility only for a large garden of national or regional importance. However, a themed collection of roses might be manageable: one could, for example, concentrate on the Bourbons, or whatever subgroup or historic period took your fancy. It's about time someone made a collection of roses from the 1940s and 1950s. While many of these are still around, there must be many more lingering on in gardens, but abandoned by commerce. 'Eiffel Tower', raised in the 1960s, which I once grew, seems already to be unavailable in Britain. But fashions change, and what goes out of fashion may after a while become fashionable once again.

When it comes to selecting roses, the choice seems unlimited, and new ones continue to stream from the breeders every year. But whether you make a limited collection by period, a collection by type (species, hybrid tea, floribunda, patio, ground cover, etc), or simply grow a few roses you fancy, there will still be the issue of colour to consider, especially if modern roses are chosen. Not all roses blend together. You may or may not like the rose called 'Masquerade'; I do, as it is a "multi" — a mixture of yellow and red — which looks so good with catmint and lavender to cool it down. But it's important to remember that this rose will on no account blend with the soft, mauvey pinks of the old roses. And many of the "salmon pinks" won't blend with the older hint-of-mauve pinks either, because of the trace of yellow they have in them.

What is most often meant by a rose garden is one in which the dominant plants are roses, blended in with sympathetic perennials, climbers, and occasionally other shrubs, as at the famous English examples of rose gardens at Sissinghurst in Kent and Mottisfont in Hampshire. Completeness is not the issue: all that is aimed at is to create a pleasing garden at rose time, and as far into the other summer months as possible. Even so, such rose gardens are often part of some garden whose overall size is much larger than average and in this context it is perfectly acceptable for this particular part of the garden to have only one season of interest.

One of the problems of rose gardens is that roses as plants resent competition by other plants. They hate to be crowded around with vigorous perennials, for example, and respond by sulking and behaving badly. Roses are hungry plants that need feeding, and it is almost impossible to apply a mulch to the surface of ground already covered by other plants. Some gardens open to the public have a rather sneaky solution: they treat the perennials that grow around their roses as if they were bedding plants, or play musical chairs with them by moving them in and out of a reserve plot — in other words, they generally cheat in ways that are not possible where the only gardener is the garden owner.

However, whether the roses like it or not, a rose garden looks much better when the ground is covered with plants. The combination of bare soil and the prickly knees of roses looks quite hideous, no matter how beautiful the flowers may be higher up the plant. One solution is to grow taller roses. For instance, I used to associate various low-growing geraniums, hostas, and the yellowy-green Euphorbia villosa (a species that is similar to E. palustris) with a tall hybrid tea rose with cerise flowers, and the rose seemed reasonably happy. An alternative approach is to be extremely selective about the ground cover you use. At Scotney Castle, in Kent, I've seen pink hybrid teas successfully underplanted with pale pink Geranium asphodeloides, a plant that is not only low-growing, but also spreads out over a wide area from quite a small centre or crown, leaving the ground largely bare in winter for mulching and cultivation.

Picking just one or two roses for a small garden is an impossible task to approach rationally. If I tell you how wonderful 'Renaissance' is, then you will tell me about the merits of various other cultivars. However, on the whole hybrid teas are probably best avoided, because they are such inept mixers. If I had to mention particular roses, I would put in good word for R. xanthina 'Canary Bird', because it flowers so early, and R. glauca, which has the merit of foliage interest and good habit. Next in value come the rugosas, and after ...

Customer Reviews

More a general overview of garden design
Despite its title, this is in large part a general overview of garden design and types, with focused info for plant collectors rather limited. Also, the type of plant collectors he's thinking of are primarily those who comprehensively acquire plants within a single genus, not the far more common problem of the gardener who gets one of any type of plant he likes because he reads about it or sees it in the nursery.

The book does include examples of some genuses which might make a pretty good garden, and others which would not, and why. Varied genuses like Euphorbia are of course better than relatively uniform ones like Dianthus. Naturally, even in the former case, the garden should have some other plants for contrast of texture, color and/or season.

Basically, the book argues against most such focused gardens, which seems beside the point. ("You shouldn't have an overly focused garden" is rather like the advice to "eat healthy vegetables and eliminate fats" -- we already know it; what we really want is some trick to eat what we want, or recipes to really enjoy that are healthy.)

The book also explains when and how cottage gardens and meadows 'work' visually, which can help the eclectic gardener. But I think it would have benefited by some detailed examples of eclectic gardens that don't work, and how they were (or might be) fixed, by dividing, moving and reorganizing the plants that are already there.

Perhaps most useful are a few of the author's plant lists, notably the "yielding carpeters" -- species and cultivars that fill a space with low growth, and are easy to propagate, yet also easy to remove, and easily pushed aside by other, taller plants. But other such lists are readily found elsewhere (e.g., gray-leaved plants which like gravel). Arguably the book deserves 4 stars -- it should be useful for many people who haven't already read books on garden design -- but I rate it a 3 because it doesn't really follow through on its title's promise.

Not a complete horticultural course, but very helpful.
I have been gardening for more than twenty years. I have never taken a horticulture course or attended a master gardeners class. Basically, I garden all summer and read about gardening all winter. I definitely fall into the category of "Ooooo, that's lovely! Let me buy one!". It's true. I am a plant junkie, but it's the learning and experimenting that has given me so much pleasure over the years, and my gardens have greatly improved since reading this book.
Yes, Mr. Turner does talk directly to those who collect a single group of plants: for instance, euphorbias (his own obsession), daylilies, roses, etc. However, his book was very helpful to me even though I am of the "one of everything school of collecting".
For starters, though I have read many books and magazine articles on garden design, his book was the first that finally helped me to understand what the "bones" or "structure" of a garden are, and why they are so important.
And he gives many examples in his book of how to take a collection of a single type of plant, say Heliopsis, and mix it into a variety of other plants, so that the collection is no longer like a coin collection, all lined up in rows for viewing, but an integral part of a beautiful whole. I think he did a fine job of teaching this concept. I just had to think in terms of plants that are similar to one another, rather than being of one species,(ie. Shastas, Rudbeckias, heliopsis, heleniums, chrysanthemums, etc.)and apply his same design principles to them.
This being said, his book is not the one, complete, answer to all my questions on the subject of garden design. I can recommend several others that are excellent (beginning with anything by Pamela Harper, for example), but cannot say that I have yet run across that one "read it and you've got it" book.
I have decided that garden design is probably a natural gift for the lucky artistic few, and a skill that must (but can) be learned, practiced, refined, and experienced over a period of time for the rest of us.
To me, a good gardening book gives me a new, better, or expanded understanding of the knowledge that I may have acquired from another book, article, or speaker. So, I thought this was a very good book. I learned a great deal from it. I recommend it as one good piece of an enthustiastic, amateur gardener's education.
P.S. If you want to be able to read books on gardening that go beyond the Sunset Series, you simply must learn latin names for plants. I have found that one good reference book that gives an exhaustive list for plants that grow and thrive in my climate (which, for me is the Southern Living Garden Book)is a critical companion to have available when I read other gardening books. I see the latin names of plants in the book, look them up in my reference, and then have a better idea of my chances of growing it successfully. The more I work this process, the more Latin names I know.

A book needed by amateurs stricken with the disease of gardening.
I am giving this book a full five stars because I have yet to find another to compare it to concerning this subject matter.

Living in the heart of the midwestern United States, the typical British tome offers very little of any substance to me. In spite of the fact that the author is British, I feel the book has much to offer if one ignores some of the specific plants that are used as examples. Mr. Turner instead outlines the pitfalls of merely collecting plants. Quite simply, he admits that plant collectors will continue to collect. However, he encourages and outlines techniques to establish gardening goals other than just "MORE!". Essentially: If you are going to collect, (And you will.) do your collecting well.

The often dreadful look of a collector's garden has long been in great need of discussion. This book does a wonderful job of broaching that subject.