This concise, easy-to-use book shows how to create productive gardens by selecting the perfect plant combinations. A comprehensive plant directory provides handy information on summer-flowering annuals, herbaceous perennials, shrubs, small trees, climbers, water plants, bamboos, culinary herbs, fruits, vegetables and more.

“Gardentopia is that rare marriage of the art of landscaping and the technical knowledge of how to compose a landscape—boiled down to readily understood and easily executed actions. This book puts you in the driver’s seat and shows you how to chart the course to your own personal garden utopia.” - Margie Grace, Grace Design Associates Any backyard has the potential to refresh and inspire if you know what to do. Jan Johnsen’s new book, Gardentopia: Design Basics for Creating Beautiful Outdoor Spaces, will delight all garden lovers with over 130 lushly illustrated landscape design and planting suggestions. Ms. Johnsen is an admired designer and popular speaker whose hands-on approach to “co-creating with nature” will have you saying, “I can do that!’ This info-packed, sumptuous book offers individual tips for enhancing any size landscape using ‘real world’ solutions. The suggestions are grouped into five categories that include Garden Design and Artful Accents, Walls, Patios, and Steps and Plants and Planting, among others. Whether you are an experienced gardener or a landscaping novice, Gardentopia will inspire you with tips such as ‘Soften a Corner”, “Paint it Black”, and “Hide and Reveal”.

This book offers an exciting alternative to traditional garden making. Rich in plants, sustainable and good for the environment, naturalistic gardens are also beautiful, upliftning places that resonate with the energy of the natural world - but they can be challenging to get right.

“Fear deer no more! The best source I’ve seen on the topic!” —Tracy DiSabato-Aust, award-winning garden designer and best-selling author Deer are one of the most common problems a gardener can face. These cute but pesky animals can quickly devour hundreds of dollars’ worth of plants. And common solutions include the use of unattractive fencing and chemicals. In Deer-Resistant Design, Karen Chapman offers another option—intentional design choices that result in beautiful gardens that coexist with wildlife. Deer-Resistant Design showcases real home gardens across North America—from a country garden in New Jersey to a hilltop hacienda in Texas—that have successfully managed the presence of deer. Each homeowner also shares their top ten deer-resistant plants, all welcome additions to a deer-challenged gardeners shopping list. A chapter on deer-resistant container gardens provides suggestions for making colorful, captivating, and imaginative containers. Lushly illustrated and filled with practical advice and inspiring design ideas, Deer-Resistant Design is packed with everything you need to confidently tackle this challenging problem.

Piet Oudolf's gardens excite the senses and stir the emotions. Representing a giant step forward from the conventional colour-themed border, this new approach to gardening gives just as much emphasis to form, texture, light and movement as it does to colour. Individual plants are used as harmonious elements in luxuriant and atmospheric plantings. Written in collaboration with Noël Kingsbury, Designing with Plants is an informative and visually breathtaking study of Piet Oudolf's planting theory and practice, and it provides all the advice necessary to create the same effects in your own garden.Beginning with the building blocks of planting design, a visual sourcebook of Planting Palettes illustrates some of the huge choice available in terms of form, texture and colour. The following chapter explains, with the use of planting plans and diagrams, how to combine these basic elements to create stunning and sculptural planting schemes. Theory is put into practice in Planting Moods in which stunning photography demonstrates how to create a particular feeling or atmosphere, and Year-Round Planting emphasizes the importance of choosing plants to give value throughout the seasons so that they contribute to the garden in death as well as in life. Rounding off with a detailed directory of key plants, Designing with Plants is destined to become an inspiration to all gardeners who wish to create, in Piet's words, 'an impression and an expression of nature'.

Discover how to select, arrange, and coordinate the plants, trees, and shrubs in your garden for maximum impact and ease of care throughout the year. Hundreds of ways to mix and match plants for long-lasting beauty.

Brie Arthur's Gardening with Grains is a passion project that grew from a light-bulb, aha moment - that's when she realized we've been missing a dynamic piece of the burgeoning foodscape movement. We've learned the joys of interplanting our blooming flowerbeds with veggies, herbs and berries - but what about the grains, those ancient and beautiful grasses that practically gave us civilization: wheat, barley and oats for winter; corn, rice and sorghum for the warm season. Gardening with Grains is a pioneering book, a companion to Arthur's The Foodscape Revolution. Richly illustrated, it combines history, environmental benefits and personal stories with simple how-to's for planning, growing and harvesting 6 important grains. Includes 12 chef-tested recipes for inspiration. This is a design book, too, with planting patterns and suggestions, no matter how much or how little garden space you have. These grains are ornamental grasses, and they show off beautifully in any setting. The grouped plantings reveal the grains' varied colors and textures, interplanted with flowers like poppies, larkspur, snapdragons, nigella, zinnias, sunflowers and marigolds. Not only flowers, but salad greens and other decorative veggies play well with grains. Gardening with Grains is foodscaping for fun, beauty and bragging rights. . . and maybe even some homemade beer and bread.(Genus illustrations and garden plans by landscape architect and botanical artist Preston Montague.)