Product Description

Any avid gardener knows the frustration of searching in vain for realistic and practical gardening resources. Coffee-table books full of lush images of English country gardens and technical volumes on landscape design are of little use to dirt-under-the-nails gardeners seeking straight answers to questions about planning a cutting garden that really produces.

Suzanne McIntire provides a bumper crop of such down to earth help in An American Cutting Garden. Using both common and botanical names, she discusses in depth a wide variety of herbaceous perennials, biennials, annuals, and bulbs, and provides sensible directions for choosing ideal plants. Often illustrating her advice with personal accounts of mistakes and successes, McIntire supplies information on a wide range of topics: the length of stems one might expect from the cutting garden, how many plants are needed of any one kind, when and how to successfully sow seed outdoors, the heat-hardiness of plants, and strategies for coping with the effects of hot summers and cold winters. She also advises on the simple and rewarding “haphazard school” of flower arranging. Special chapters sympathetically address the beginner’s cutting garden, a cutting garden for small spaces and another for shade, and autumn in the cutting garden.

A series of invaluable appendices offer instruction for starting seed under lights, a list of plants that self-sow in the author’s garden, and sources for plants. From the earliest pansy (Viola x wittrockiana) to the latest chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum pacificum), a unique section lists hundreds of plants in order of bloom throughout the growing year, enabling both the novice and the experienced gardener to plan for complementary blooms and extend the cut-flower season. An American Cutting Garden is a real gardener’s gardening book, and will be enormously helpful—even to those who don’t grow flowers for cutting.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1613377 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 284 pages

Review
"McIntire writes with a wonderful sense of humor and provides continually useful information throughout the book." -- Holly H. Shimizu, cohost of PBS's The Victory Garden and Executive Director, U.S. Botanic Garden

A veteran of meeting the challenges of gardening in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic...McIntire shares 200 choice plants and tips. -- Book News

[H]ighly informative...Reflect[s] a real grasp of gardening in our area with all its pleasures and frustrations. -- Potomac Lily Society Newsletter

[McIntire's] helpful advice could, we suppose, be referred to as cutting remarks. -- Publishers Weekly

Review

""A useful addition to every flower arranger's bookshelf, this is a book to have at hand when you place your seed/plant order." -- American Gardener

""A refreshing 'how-to' book for creating a cutting garden. McIntire writes with a wonderful sense of humor and provides continually useful information throughout the book." -- Holly H. Shimizu, cohost of PBS's The Victory Garden and Executive Director, U.S. Botanic Garden

"]"For those who would rather grow bouquets than buy them.... First buy the ultimate primer for growing cut flowers, An American Cutting Gardenby Suzanne McIntire. This book offers everything you need to know about growing a cutting garden -- preparing a site, laying it out, coordinating bloom, harvesting. It covers the culture of hundreds of annuals, biennials, bulbs and other perennials. Its appendixes include instructions for starting seeds under lights, lists of plants and resources for materials." -- Washington Post

About the Author
Suzanne McIntire is a freelance writer and seasoned veteran of gardening in the hot summers and cold winters of northern Virginia. She is the editor of The American Heritage Book of Great American Speeches for Young People.

Customer Reviews

An excellent resource for all gardeners
An American Cutting Garden provides in depth information for anyone interested in growing his own cut flowers. Whether you are a novice or a pro, this book offers practical advice that gardeners of all experience levels will enjoy. You'll no longer have to pour through book after book to decide what to grow and how to grow it. Everything you need to know about a cutting garden is contained in these pages.

Cutting Gardens by Your Best Friend Who You Never Met
So many garden books so little time! Yet take time for McIntire's hands on common sense. McIntire has spent 14 years experimenting and learning. It's as if your friend had decided to help you get started. And she can write. No matter where you are gardening, McIntire's got tips to get you started and to increase your expertise if you have already begun. If you are a real novice get a copy of the American Horticultural Society A to Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants (ISBN 8789419432) which has all the pictures of all the plants. But, if you want to learn what to plant under what conditions and how to succeed no matter how small, how shaded, how unfavorable your conditions might be, McIntire will, with writing which approaches the garden writing greats in style, lead you in the right direction. Skill is not the secret. But McIntire will provide you with the skills she has developed and the love for the process of gardening that nurtures every gardener, new or old. Best of all she will not send you out to buy 18 irises at $18.00 each. You can start with packets of seed. She follows in the footsteps of Henry Mitchel and Elenor Perenyi. Yet she provides simple access. Any latin or common name can be found in her Index of Plants. If you wonder how to coordinate various plants so that you have things in bloom over the season, there is a Sequence of Bloom for all the plants mentioned. Now the paperback has 28 color pictures (buy the A to Z). Gardening is much more than the photos in books and catalogues. We don't have Vita Sackville West's gardeners. We don't live at White Flower Farm. We have a small plot of mediocre soil and hope. Suzanne McIntire will provide you with both the knowledge and the intangible sprit to produce a cutting garden with flowers you will love and cherish. Try it. Try it. You will see!

An American Cutting Garden
Finally a book that helps me navigate through the garden with a bit of information that is useful.I had great success using this text as a tool to prepare my beds for spring and summer. My garden looked beautiful. I experimented with new plants well.