Plant This: Best Bets for Year-Round Gorgeous Gardens

Rating:
Summary: Buy this!
Review: I just got this book the other day and I have to say, I just love it!! I'm somewhat new to gardening (just bought a house in Seattle's Phinney Ridge neighborhood a year ago) and I really enjoy this approach of focusing on certain plants instead of trying to cover the sun, the moon and the stars. Levine's sense of humor throughout the book is delightful and makes the entire book a fun read. And it's a brilliant idea to organize it by season. Keep it in mind as a gift for other gardening friends.

Also recommended: The Book of Outdoor Gardening - Smith & Hawken

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful illustrations, overly talky text
Review: I once took a friend to a beautiful wild garden that had been planted (over many years) incredibly well. Since she is a fan of plants and gardens I had hoped that we could walk the grounds - quietly and appreciatively. Instead my friend chattered incessantly for the entire hour and a half we were there. Each plant provoked a monologue: anecdotes, jokes, asides, and factual material in an ultimately maddening cacophonous symphony. This book had the same effect on me. You are awed by the quiet beauty of Rene Eisenbart's paintings, you know that the plants described are great, but the text is so talky as to be distracting - and even annoying. If you enjoy a lot of off-topic opinions and chat about all sorts of things, then this is the book for you. If you want to study and enjoy beautiful plants in a quieter frame of mind, look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Plant this-- and watch it die.
Review: I've enjoyed Ketzel on NPR for some time, and looked forward to her book. I am not disappointed, and agree with Michael Spencer..this book would make a great gift for gardeners with ANY level of experience. The focus on plants by season makes shopping oh-so-easy, and her humor makes it read like short stories. I could pare down my gardening library by dozens of books, but this one will remain. Thanks, Ketzel!

Rating:
Summary: Unforgettable descriptions
Review: If reading how-to guides to horticulture leaves you cold, consider treating yourself to a delightful new book by NPR's Doyenne of Dirt, Ketzel Levine. Her book, Plant This!, reads less like last year's newspaper than like a spirited, highly opinionated rant from your favorite long-lost friend. In unforgettable descriptions of 100 of her favorite plants, Ms. Levine writes with authority, humor, and (don't be embarrassed now) love - all traits shared by avid gardeners everywhere. So read this book to remember why you love a particular plant, to discover new plants you haven't yet had the pleasure to have known, and most of all to be encouraged anew to garden, garden, garden!

Rating:
Summary: It's an opinion list.
Review: It's hard to rate an opinion based on accuracy, so I'm rating this book on usefulness and general appeal.

In terms of general appeal, I have two major objections to this book:

One, it is heavily biased to woodland and foliage plants. This is fine to a point, but to bill it as "best bets for year-round gorgeous gardens" I think is misleading. We are talking about plantings where shape and texture dominate, and that is a rather specialized gardening challenge.

Two, this book is very region-specific in terms of the plants covered. The author and I both live in Zone 8, but she lives in the Pacific Northwest, while I live on the Atlantic Seaboard. The upshot of this is that, despite 5 years in the nursery business, I have never seen a great many of the plants in this book. They can, theoretically, be grown here, but good luck laying your hands on them. Mail order catalogs can solve this problem, but it is something to remember when considering this book.

In terms of usefulness, this is, as I've said, an opinion-based book. It's usefulness will be limited to how closely your opinions on what makes for a "gorgeous" garden matches hers. Do you prefer subtle presentation or ostentation? Will you take the time to appreciate small beauties, and do you have the patience and skill to bring those features out in such a way that those less experienced will be able to find them? Not my call; just remember that this book is about small details. A considerable part of each two page entry is devoted to making the case for _why_ a given specimen should be considered beautiful.

The long and the short of it is that this book is not for beginners. Nor, I think, is it a particularly good introduction to the more advanced forms of plantings. Overall I found that I either knew the plant to begin with (in which case I already had an opinion and didn't need hers), or the information provided --while detailed-- did not adequately convey to me the appearance of the plant. Unfortunate, since it is a book about selection, with relatively little to say about cultivation.

Rating:
Summary: Plant this-- and watch it die.
Review: This book should come with a cautionary note: the author is a smug zone-8 gardener; unless you are in the Pacific Northwest, this book is useless as a gardening guide. Moreover, the author does not include USDA hardiness zones in the description, perhaps instead of the cutesy "sounds like" guide to pronouncing the latin name ("Epimedium" sounds like "stop the tedium".) Perhaps it did not occur to her that people from other regions of the country would read this book. For those of us outside the Pacific Northwest, this book should have been called "Plant this-- and watch it die." The illustrations are lovely, but the author's affected folksiness (most egregious example so far: "Yup") make this an extremely annoying read.