Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #416487 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• 192 pages

Amazon.com Review
The need for keeping a garden diary is as apparent as the limitations of our memories. Not only do we frequently lose plant names, but also freeze dates and garden triumphs as well as failures. Beautiful enough to give as a gift, and practical enough to use yourself everyday, The New Three-Year Garden Journal should work better than the many notebooks one begins and discards over the years.

Each month begins with advice on plants and design; herbs, climbers, shrubs, trees, annuals and bulbs are all discussed and illustrated with color photos. Then for each month, weather warnings are given by region of the country (April: danger of frost continues in the Northeast, September: extreme heat still possible in the mid-South), and tasks for each week of the month, divided by the same seven regions. Pruning, fertilizing, planting, and maintenance tasks are described alongside lined pages for each of the three years.

It is clear that The New Three Year Garden Journal was designed by a gardener. Chock full of information, it is spiral-bound to lay flat so it's easy to write in. Carry it with you into the garden, glue in photos or sketch ideas on the pages of graph paper, dream over the lovely color photos. This is a book to use over and over again during the three-year period it covers, then look back at for years into the future. --Valerie Easton

Review
"...lush color photos ... Completely revised and updated ... Offers in-depth, practical advice and details on landscape design..." -- Connie Krochmal, BellaOnline, October 15, 2006

About the Author
Louise Carter is an award-winning author of garden books and articles. Her articles and photographs have appeared in the New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mainline Times, Horticulture, Fine Gardening, Pacific Horticulture, Green Scene, Garden Design, Landscape Architecture, and many others; she has also written two books and several calendars with Fulcrum Publishing.

Customer Reviews

The New Three-Year Garden Journal:With Regional Planning gui
This is a great book. There is plenty of space provided for you to write about your garden for every week of the year. It is also very informative. It gives specific info. for every zone in many different gardening topics for every month. And it has a special topic it goes into depth for for every month of the year. There are beautiful photographs throughout the entire book. It also has graph pages for designing gardens. I have recommended this book to quite a few friends who have loved it.

Both useful and beautiful
As an experienced gardener, I've used a number of journals over the years. This one ranks among the best for utility and beauty. There are a number of full color photos scattered throughout, along with (loosely) season-specific design guides: Designing with Vegetables in summer, Designing with Houseplants in winter, etc. The back of the book also includes garden maintenance information on pruning, winter protection, propagation, and other areas. None of this maintenance information is especially new or comprehensive, but it's handy to have as a quick reference. There are also blank graphing pages throughout for your own design ideas.

The real value in this book for me is in the week-by-week "to-do" lists for each region and in the many blank lines for my notes. For example, in the second week of October in the mid-Atlantic, the book advises that you prune and fasten climbing plants against wind damage and take hardwood cuttings to increase plant stock. These to-do lists are great reminders for when to fertilize the lawn, prune woody plants, plant peas and lettuce, etc.

Each week also has three columns of blank lines for your notes, with a blank header line to fill in the year. This layout is especially appealing to me, as I may use all three columns the first week of January to lay out my design ideas one year, but I still have three weeks of note space left for the following years' January notes. During growing season, I use only one column per week to track weather, pests, and so on.

The only gripe I have about this book is that while it is spiral-bound to lie flat, it's not possible to fold in back on itself like most spiral notebooks. It's also a fairly large book so you pretty much need to lie it flat on a table to be comfortable writing in it -- or at least I do. If it folded on itself, it would be a lot easier to take notes with the book resting in my lap in the garden.

Otherwise, highly recommended.

The New Three-Year Garden Journel
While there are wonderful photos and a very nice layout in the book, the regional gardening guide completely omits the Upper Midwest. I was very disappointed because the growing conditions in places like Minnesota, Wisconson, Iowa and Illinois are not represented. I would also conclude if you live in places like Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, you may also be disappointed because those climates and growing conditions are also not represented. While one could follow the regional guides for the Plains, Mid South or the Northest in these areas, omiting these regions really is not acceptable. For about a third of the country, this is not a good choice for a garden journal.