Knowing when and how to plant a tree are crucial to its survival. But if you select the wrong tree for your particular area and conditions, the proper planting techniques will not make a difference. Because Texas is a big place with varied climates, soils, and water qualities, a wide variety of trees can be grown there. Howard Garrett, also known as the "Dirt Doctor," explores the wide-ranging possibilities in a book that will prove its value to homeowners, landscape architects, contractors, nurseries, gardeners, and others who want healthy trees. Texas Trees includes a complete description of native and best-introduced trees and gives details on natural habitats and preferred sites, planting and maintenance, identification information, flowers, fruit and foliage, culture, problems, and propagation. Texas Trees is for all Texas tree lovers, from the Red River to the Gulf Coast, the piney woods to the deserts and mountains.

"Fruit can be grown almost anywhere" says Mr. Bush, "if you are prepared to take the trouble" . However, quite often the most intelligent and ardent gardener can go wrong simply because the trouble he takes is ill-directed. This book, first published in 1942 and since twice reprinted and revised, tries to guide the amateur in the growing of soft fruits. The subject is dealt with methodically; the general questions of aspect, soil, nursery material and planting procedure are reviewed first. There follows a discussion of the specific cultural details associated with the various soft fruits. The range is wide. Besides the better known blackberries, loganberries, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, tomatoes and mushrooms, the less familiar figs, outdoor grapes, mulberries, cranberries, barberries, melons and passion fruit are included. Other matters are dealt with as well. The vagaries of temperature and climate, the use of the compost heap, the need for and practice of spraying are all separately and exactly explained. There is also a chapter on the pruning of cobs, a subject of which many horticulturalists fight shy. The perils and pitfalls which complicate the best laid plans of the most well-intentioned gardener are here averted. Contents Include: An Ounce of Practice - Coming Down to Earth - On Choosing Nursery Stock - Planting Fruit Bushes - Blackberries, Loganberries and Hybrids - The Black Currant - Red and White Currants - The Fig - Gooseberries - Grapes out of Doors - The Raspberry - Strawberries - The Tomato - Some Oddments - Nuts: Cob Nuts, Filberts and Walnuts - Is Spraying Necessary? - Mushrooms - The Whys and Wherefores of Spring Frosts - Manuring and CompostHeaps

The remarkable story of Dr Shirley Sherwood, scientist, author, travel writer, gardener as well as mother and grandmother.

Following the tragic death of her brilliant scientist husband, Michael Cross, in a freak air crash in 1964, she was left as a 30-year-old widow with two young boys aged four and three. For the next twelve years she worked as a key member of the Nobel Prize-winning team which developed Tagamet, the first blockbuster drug (sales of over $1 billion a year). After her marriage to Jim Sherwood in 1977, she left science to concentrate full-time on the huge task of restoring the fabled Orient-Express train, probably the most luxurious and exotic form of travel ever devised. The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, running between London and Venice, was relaunched in 1982, ninety-nine years after its first journey. Sherwood's history of the project sold more than 400,000 copies. The Orient-Express train was just the beginning.

The Sherwoods went on to create the five-star Orient-Express Hotels company (now Belmond), which owned some of the finest hotels in the world, including the Cipriani in Venice, the Mount Nelson in Cape Town and the Copacabana Palace in Rio. They pioneered new train routes across the Alps, started the Eastern & Oriental Express running between Singapore and Bangkok- crossing over the Bridge on the River Kwai- opened up tourism in Myanmar with the first cruise ship to operate on the Irrawaddy, and took over the railways of Peru, which run all the way to Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca.

Her most lasting achievement, the one of which she is proudest, is the Shirley Sherwood Collection of contemporary botanical art, which she started in 1990 and now includes over 1,000 paintings and drawings representing the work of more than 300 contemporary botanical artists from 36 countries. She has mounted exhibitions in many prestigious locations including the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Kirstenbosch in Cape Town and the Real Jardin Botanico, Madrid. The Shirley Sherwood Gallery in Kew Gardens is the first museum to be dedicated to modern botanical art and her books, which often accompanied her exhibitions, have been largely responsible for re-establishing botanical art in its rightful place as an important art form.

These are just some of the many achievements in a long and rich life, vividly described in this book.

In The Flower Hunter, Lucy Hunter takes us on an inspirational journey through a year in her garden and artist's studio set among the mountains of North Wales. Lucy's evocative, gently humorous words accompany her glorious photographs and exquisite floral arrangements, as she encourages the reader to marvel at the intricate cycles of the natural world, develop their own innate creativity and to look for beauty in the everyday. Her garden provides the raw materials for Lucy's floral artistry - breathtaking naturalistic arrangements with the painterly beauty and flourish of a Dutch still life. Simple projects accompany Lucy's text, from drying garden flowers for an autumnal wreath to making your own journals and natural dyes to assembling lavish arrangements that showcase the voluptuous beauty of garden roses. Lucy believes that we all have a creative voice buried deep within. The Flower Hunter will encourage you to find your own creativity and help it to blossom.

This delightful collection of wisdom, insight and humor, from Diane Ackerman to Emile Zola, captures the essence of the world's most popular hobby. Here are over four hundred quotations -- not only one-line zingers but stanzas of verse and full paragraphs of narrative -- on the endless fascination of gardening. The great gardening writers of past and present are amply represented, but these varied selections also range the entirety of recorded literature, from the Bible and the tenth-century Japanese diarist Sei Shonagon through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Walt Whitman, and even Prince Charles.

For anyone who counts their hours in the soil as their most valued, "The Quotable Gardener" is the ideal gift -- an invaluable inspiration during the gardening months, and a treasured companion during the long, desperate winter.

This compact book gives both the first-time and the experienced gardener success this year and for years to come. Topics include garden design; wildflowers; gardening with trellises, stakes, and arbors; creating new gardens; and more.

What could be better than watching the natural world out your window or on your television? Going out and experiencing it firsthand. In these fifty essays, acclaimed nature and science writer Sy Montgomery takes her readers on a season-by-season tour of the wilderness that is often as close as the backyard. Sy invites -- almost dares -- readers to follow her and form hands-on relationships with the plants, animals, birds, and even the insects that share space with people. These essays, most of which originally appeared in Sy's Boston Globe column Nature Journal, are by turns enlightening, entertaining, sometimes amusing, and always absorbing and informative. Filled with natural history and lore, the essays urge readers to appreciate what they find around them.

Loaded with plants that conjure visions of tropical islands and pina coladas, this book makes real every gardener's dream of living in a private Eden. Detailed, step-by-step instructions guide gardeners through the process of cultivating their own tropical gardens with thick foliage and bright, bold plants.

Are you excited about permaculture but unclear how to put it into practice for yourself? In this unique, full colour guide, experienced permaculture teacher Aranya leads you through the design process from beginning to end, using clear explanations, flowcharts and diagrams. It is based on course worksheets which have been designed, refined and tested on students over time. Linking theory to practice, he places the ethics, principles, philosophies, tools and techniques directly into the context of the process itself. While written for anyone with a basic grasp of permaculture, this book also has plenty to offer the more experienced designer. This guide covers: Systems and patterns ~ Working as part of a design team ~ Land and non-land based design ~ Design frameworks ~ Site surveying and map making ~ Interviewing clients ~ Working with large client groups ~ Identifying functions ~ Choosing systems and elements ~ Placement and integration ~ Creating a design proposal ~ Project management ~ Presenting your ideas to clients ~ and much more. A great reference for anyone who has done, or is thinking of doing, any kind of permaculture course.

Charlotte Moss encourages readers to bring the garden indoors with ideas for arranging flowers, selecting containers, and placing blossoms around the house. An inviting cluster of blooms on a guest room s bedside table, lavish floral displays for parties and holidays, single stems adding life to any corner of a room Moss has been photographing her flower arrangements for over a decade. This book is a celebration of her artistry and a testament to flowers as part of day-to-day life. From Moss s grander displays in the city to her more informal and breezy creations at her home in the country, as well as in the refined interiors of her clients, the visual result is a chronicle of the myriad ways flowers provide inspiration indoors and out. Readers will be further motivated as Moss describes the contributions of past tastemakers: Gloria Vanderbilt for her ingenious use of floral patterns in her licensed products, Pauline de Rothschild for her fantastic tablescapes, Bunny Mellon for her profusive use of topiaries, Constance Spry for the use of inventive containers and for her groundbreaking artistry, and Lady Bird Johnson for her embrace of the simple, exquisite wildflower. With nature as her muse, Moss implores us to create the backdrop for a life well lived, imbuing every day with flair, beauty, and elegance.

Easy-to-read information and full-color photography guide the readers to information on the best grasses that grow in the hot, humid South, and instructions on planting and maintenance for each season of the year.

With more than 200 lists of plants and garden resources, this guide has the answers on what to plant where and on how to handle the toughest of Texas conditions. William D. Adams and Lois Trigg Chaplin offer numerous recommendations, noting the best growing zones and bringing together helpful hints and information from dozens of gardeners, nurseries, and horticultural professionals across the state.

The Middle Ages was a time of great upheaval - the period between the seventh and fourteenth centuries saw great social, political and economic change. The radically distinct cultures of the Christian West, Byzantium, Persian-influenced Islam, and al-Andalus resulted in different responses to the garden arts of antiquity and different attitudes to the natural world and its artful manipulation. Yet these cultures interacted and communicated, trading plants, myths and texts. By the fifteenth century the garden as a cultural phenomenon was immensely sophisticated and a vital element in the way society saw itself and its relation to nature. A Cultural History of Gardens in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on issues of design, types of gardens, planting, use and reception, issues of meaning, verbal and visual representation of gardens, and the relationship of gardens to the larger landscape.

Part of a gardening series which offers expert advice and tips on plant care in both the home and the garden, this book deals with colour for the balcony. Illustrated throughout with colour step-by-step photographs, this series covers everything from fertilizing to maintaining a garden pond.

Bulletproof Flowers for the South illustrates how to plant, grow, and care for a large variety of hardy Southern flowers. Including an A-Z encyclopedia of Southern favorites and twenty comprehensive lists of favorite flowers from expert nurseries around the South, this beautifully illustrated book presents superior long-blooming, heat-resistant flowers.

Thirty years after Beth Chatto first created her now famous gardens, The Green Tapestry was published, in which Beth took her readers on a conducted tour of her gardens while explaining her planting choices and experiences in making a garden with perennial plants. Now, a further thirty years on, although Beth is no longer with us, the gardens continue to demonstrate her ethos of sustainable planting, which, with climate change an ever more pressing issue, could not be more relevant today. In Beth Chatto's Green Tapestry Revisited, David Ward and Asa Gregers-Warg, who worked alongside Beth for many years and still work at the gardens today, have updated her guide to her gardens, adding new text where areas of the garden have been substantially remodelled and replanted since the first edition, in particular the Gravel Garden, the Woodland Garden and the Reservoir Garden, with an updated directory of Beth's favourite perennial plants. Beth's gardens at Elmstead Market were, in many ways, ahead of their time. Beth's knowledge as a plantswoman, derived in part from her husband Andrew's research into plants in their natural habitats, also came from her own extensive practical experience. She set out to garden using only those plants that thrived in the available conditions - damp or dry, sun or shade. It was her talent for observation, her enthusiasm for learning, and her never-ending interest in the foliage, form and texture of her preferred perennials, as much as in their flower colour, that made her a unique voice in British gardening. Illustrated with specially commissioned photography by Steven Wooster, who was Beth's preferred photographer of her gardens, this new edition is a timely tribute to Beth's work. Julia Boulton, Beth's granddaughter and the CEO of Beth Chatto's Plants and Gardens, hopes that it will inspire a new generation of gardeners to plant in tune with nature and create their own exquisite 'green tapestry' of perennial plants suited to their own conditions. -- que