Few gardens can transport visitors to wild and rugged landscapes as well as rock gardens. Eye-catching rock gardens are among the most challenging -- and satisfying -- expressions of the gardener's craft. A true rock garden is a specialized habitat that allows the gardener to grow plants that do not flourish anywhere else. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of building rock gardens in all parts of North America. Topics covered include rock placement, materials, and planting and maintenance. Variations on the rock garden theme, from planting troughs to creating water features are also discussed. The book presents regional styles and techniques and profiles a dozen public rock gardens from Oregon to Newfoundland. More than 100 inspiring photos accompany the lively text.

Win the war against the world's most hated garden pests with a battle plan of 50 effective slug-killing tactics-all amusingly written and illustrated with cartoons. An at-a-glance profile reveals effective weapons to use against the slug (including beer), and there are smart new ways to confuse them and set them off track. Choose from those 50 slug-beaters, and inflict death the natural way, by chemical warfare, and by the "surprise" attack. Never has such a practical handbook been such fun to read.

'A garden is the best alternative therapy' - Germaine Greer. Seasoned gardeners, urbanites with window boxes and those who simply potter when the sun is shining will savour this miscellany of quotations and prose celebrating the great outdoors, interspersed with practical advice on everything from keeping your shed in order to bird spotting.

Gain some new ideas along with the principles and history of Japanese stone gardening with this useful and beautiful garden design book. Japanese Stone Gardens provides a comprehensive introduction to the powerful mystique and dynamism of the Japanese stone garden--from their earliest use as props in animistic rituals, to their appropriation by Zen monks and priests to create settings conducive to contemplation and finally to their contemporary uses and meaning. With insightful text and abundant imagery, this book reveals the hidden order of stone gardens and in the process heightens the enthusiast's appreciation of them. The Japanese stone garden is an art form recognized around the globe. These meditative gardens provide tranquil settings, where visitors can shed the burdens and stresses of modern existence, satisfy an age-old yearning for solitude and repose, and experience the restorative power of art and nature. For this reason, the value of the Japanese stone garden today is arguably even greater than when many of them were created. Fifteen gardens are featured in this book: some well known, such as the famous temple gardens of Kyoto, others less so, among them gardens spread through the south of Honshu Island and the southern islands of Shikoku and Kyushu and in faraway Okinawa.

Christopher Lloyd (Christo) was one of the greatest English gardeners of the twentieth century, perhaps the finest plantsman of them all. His creation is the garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex, and it is a tribute to his vision and achievement that, after his death in 2006, the Heritage Lottery Fund made a grant of GBP4 million to help preserve it for the nation. This enjoyable and revealing book - the first biography of Christo - is also the story of Dixter from 1910 to 2006, a unique unbroken history of one English house and one English garden spanning a century. It was Christo's father, Nathaniel, who bought the medieval manor at Dixter and called in the fashionable Edwardian architect, Lutyens, to rebuild the house and lay out the garden. And it was his mother, Daisy, who made the first wild garden in the meadows there. Christo was born at Dixter in 1921. Apart from boarding school, war service and a period at horticultural college, he spent his whole life there, constantly re-planting and enriching the garden, while turning out landmark books and exhaustive journalism. Opinionated, argumentative and gloriously eccentric, he changed the face of English gardening through his passions for meadow gardening, dazzling colours and thorough husbandry. As the baby of a family of six - five boys and a girl - Christo was stifled by his adoring mother. Music-loving and sports-hating, he knew the Latin names of plants before he was eight. This fascinating book reveals what made Christo tick by examining his relationships with his generous but scheming mother, his like-minded friends (such as gardeners Anna Pavord and Beth Chatto) and his colleagues (including his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, a plantsman in Christo's own mould).

'As long as one has a garden one has a future' - Francis Hodgson Burnett. This practical and entertaining guide helps you make those first steps to becoming an ecogardener. Beautifully illustrated and brimming with bright ideas, it's designed to make you think, get you started and help you to have fun doing it. A useful and inspiring gift for gardeners new and old, it covers such topics as Sod's Lore (not so boring old soil), The Long-Suffering Lawn, Cheap Eats and 'how to make slugs do something useful for a change'. Wellies on, then. We've got a planet to save.

A journal for your insights--meditative or gardening. Abundantly planted with inspirational quotes from The Meditative Gardener: Cultivating Mindfulness of Body, Feelings, and Mind.

This book motivates gardeners to adopt a completely different mindset: instead of growing foreign plants and killing perceived pests, gardeners can benefit from planting indigenous vegetation with the object of actually attracting insects and other garden wildlife. It illustrates how easy it is to work with nature instead of against it. Not just another gardening book, it encourages gardeners to help preserve and restore our fast-disappearing natural heritage. In this way they can contribute to conservation right on their own doorsteps, while deriving great pleasure in the process. Virtually every aspect of environmentally-friendly gardening is covered, making it a complete “how to” guide and debunking some long-held myths. Winner of a University of KwaZulu-Natal book prize, the first edition was out of print for several years after all 15 000 copies had been sold. This new edition, which covers the eastern and northern parts of the country, is a greatly improved version of the much acclaimed original. Besides being expanded to 320 pages with much more information, it has nearly 100 colour pictures and almost twice as many black and white illustrations. The same lighthearted and entertaining style has been retained and technical terms have been avoided, thus making it an easy read. The book is enhanced by delightful humorous drawings that emphasise points made in the text. A must for all nature-loving gardeners, the large amount of information is almost encyclopedic and will also be more than useful to conservationists and anyone with an interest in the natural sciences.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Plants in Agriculture fulfills the need for a single text that promotes a comprehensive understanding of how plants operate in agriculture. By setting plant development firmly in the context of the realities of soil, climatic, and biological conditions the authors insure that this book wil be of wide use to crop scientists, horticulturalists, and pure and applied biologists. The strengths of this book are that it synthesizes subject matter from a wide range of perspectives, from sowing to harvesting, storage, marketing, and consumption of crops. Some major aspects, such as the impact of stress on yield and the effects of growing conditions on the nutritional quality of plants are synthesized for the first time. It is also a highly practical work that integrates knowledge from other disciplines, such as soil science, human and animal nutrition, and crop protection. Finally, it chooses from cool temperate, warm temperate, tropical, and arid agriculture to highlight the universal significance of principles. Simple terms and concepts are fully explained for the uninitiated.

As each summer brings the inevitable hosepipe ban, it is becoming increasingly obvious that gardening has to adapt to take account of climate change. However, regular droughts and dry periods should not stop people enjoying their gardens - or their plants.In this timely new book, Ian Cooke explains how it is still possible to have a beautiful garden with limited or dwindling water supplies. The first section covers the fundamentals of waterwise gardening, dealing with the issues of global warming, being green and looking at ways of storing and recycling water. The second section has lots of practical information and advice on improving your soil's water retention, using mulches, choosing drought-tolerant crops and irrigating successfully. Finally, there is a section on the aesthetics of dry gardening which includes an A-Z section of waterwise plants, as well as some planting schemes.Packed full if essential advice and useful information, this book cannot fail to be of interest to all gardeners whether beginner or experienced, as well as those who care about the environment.