[.ca] The Well-Tended Perennial Garden: Planting & Pruning ... (ISBN 0881924148)

Love this book.:
This book has helped me more than any other on the subject. I appreciate the way that it is organized. It and jflex-5 (for my pain and flexibility) have made my gardening experience more enjoyable. I also like the low price that Amazon has on this book. So, it works for me.

Excellent guide for the experienced gardener:
You will be overwhelmed with practical information in this illustrated guide. I recommend it for a person who has already been gardening and wants to tend, update or redesign her beds. This book gives you an up-close view of professional gardening information. It was recommended to me by a landscape architect and well worth it.

The Well Tended Perennial Garden:
This book is a great resource and has much needed information on how to maintain and prune for extended bloom and bushier perennial plants. I would like to see more plants evaluated in a future edition.

Perennials in depth:
This book is one of the top 25 best sellers for Timber Press, who have earned an enviable reputation for publishing top-notch books about gardening. Like many authors of this type of book, DiSabato-Aust has divided her material into two parts. Rather less than half provides information about basic perennial gardening - planning, maintenance and pruning for example. Rather more than half is a listing of plants giving basic information about each and information about maintenance and pruning specific to the species, and related plants. I found the most useful sections to be those on disbudding, pinching back, cutting back, thinning and dead-heading. I know these are all ways to encourage better blooms and healthier plants, but I've never known how much, when and with which plants. This book explains these techniques thoroughly. I've no excuses now - it's off with their heads and I'll have masses of bloom and compact healthy plants. The writer has packed a ton of valuable information into this book, but it isn't the most readable book on this topic and the illustrations aren't up to the usual standard for Timber Press. The dedicated gardener, however, will find lots of ideas for refining their gardening techniques.

Not for the Average Gardener:
We found this book to be more for the advanced gardener than the first-timer. There are not enough photos of the plants, and they are listed by their scientific names as opposed to their common names. A cross-reference would have been nice. We were disappointed.