Synopsis
Gardening and home landscaping advice from a down-to-earth source.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1998-02-01 | | Edition Description: | Reprint |
| Size | | Length: | 224 pages | | Height: | 9.3 in | | Width: | 7.5 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 13.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead shows you how to triumph over climate, garden pests, and the design clichés of the typical suburban landscape to make gardening an unrivaled entertainment. Here's how any gardener, even with limited land, money, time, or experience, can create a glorious cottage garden. Siting, enclosing, and "furnishing" a garden. Using the classical rules of proportion to balance your garden plan. Making the most of your garden depending upon its angle to the sun. Constructing a garden path, a rusticated arbor, or a wattle fence. Combining trees, shrubs, and perennials for abundance and bloom throughout the growing season. Using color as a unifying theme, accent, or expression of mood. Propagating shrubs and perennials simply and cheaply. Plus a special section on chemical-free pest control and deer-resistant plants.
The inimitable Cassandra Danz introduces a new American home-gardening aesthetic with a practical how-to manual for the gardener who has neither time nor money to waste. Illustrations.
Industry Reviews
Finally, another practical, funny gardening guide from Danz, who won the Garden Writer's Association Quill and Trowel Award for her first book, Mrs. Greenthumbs : How I Turned a Boring Yard into a Glorious Garden and How You Can, Too (Crown, 1993). As in her columns and television appearances, Danz uses an easygoing, neighborly style that keeps the fun in gardening. With her typical brand of humor, she discusses garden design, touts the merits of perennials, gives tips on using color and bloom time to create a pleasing garden, and warns against plants that reproduce too freely. Anecdotes from her escapades in Great Britain are included, along with her comments on meeting gardening legend Christopher Lloyd. Her fans will undoubtedly be looking for this title. Others searching for gardening wisdom with a healthy dose of wit will enjoy it, too. Recommended for public libraries. Bonnie Poquette, Appleton P.L., Wis.
Scheeren
Danz (Mrs. Greenthumbs) adroitly blends practical gardening advice and wacky humor as she shows how to create an American form of the English cottage garden. No lover of vast expanses of suburban green lawns, Danz believes gardens should be private places that offer solace from a noisy, stressful world. The word "paradise," she notes, means "a garden" in Persian. Danz offers five maxims for having one's own paradise: create a separate place from the world; plant perennials and plant them abundantly; use plants that grow easily in your climate and location; have something blooming throughout the gardening season; and don't plant magenta next to taxicab yellow. Her chapters burst with information about how, what, when and where to plant, along with advice on what to do about voracious deer and how to think of a gardenscape in terms of a series of outdoor rooms. In her highly idiosyncratic style, Danz weaves anecdotes about friends, neighbors, flower shows, Middle Eastern architecture and plant personalities into her narrative with such flair that even the pages on composting and mulching are entertaining. Reading this book is akin to having a visit from a learned horticulturist and your practical aunt who has gardened forever. Major ad/promo; author tour (Feb.)
Lopate
Few garden writers have Danz's ability to amuse while at the same time offer helpful advice based in practical know-how. . . . As entertaining as the writing may be, Danz has both strong opinions and bushelsful of design suggestions. Read her book in order to be given direction toward creating a place where appropriate plantings, and lots of them, will result in a wonderful sense of sanctuary: an abundant landscape to enhance the home as well as the community's environment.
Annotation copyright H.W. Wilson Company.
Joyce
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