Northwest Garden Style: Ideas, Designs, and Methods for the Creative Gardener

Rating:
Summary: Gardening - the art of the possible
Review: The writer starts out by saying "gardening, like politics, is the art of the possible". This book is written "to help non-professionals solve their landscaping problems by showing how other home gardeners have dealt with similar landscaping issues".

Written for the gardener in the Pacific Northwest, this book offers ideas, designs and methods for the creative gardener. In each of the eight chapters the writer introduces the topic, provides some background and context, then describes and illustrates two or three gardens where the owners have successfully faced similar issues. Some chapters, for example "Gardens in Small Spaces" and "Gardening on a Slope", address problem sites that some gardeners are faced with, others, such as "Waterwise Gardens" and "Gardens for Attracting Wildlife", help gardeners implement their choices in design. Each chapter has a plant list (and, mercifully, it's quite compact), a checklist to guide planning - sometimes with how-to-do-it diagrams - and some additional ideas to enrich this style of garden.

The writer is knowledgeable about the problems and possibilities facing the gardener in the Pacific Northwest and writes with clarity, always maintaining a balance between the lyrical and the practical.

L. Quartermain Younker's photographs illustrate the richness of northwest gardens and focus on some of the successful treatments of daunting sites and the applications of environmentally friendly principles.

This book will jump-start the novice gardener in the Pacific Northwest as well as offering mnore experienced gardeners new ideas and new viewpoints.