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Book Description:
Plants can be flamboyant and voluptuous, funny and frivolous, even shy and retiring, but do they really have personalities? In this book, Klein demonstrates how understanding plants' needs and providing the appropriate conditions enables them to develop their true characters---the qualities that make them what they are. Personality traits can be as valuable as height, habit, and flower color when choosing your plants. Some plants are good natured, contributing to the overall landscape for months, while others are fleeting, grabbing the spotlight for a brief but breathtaking display. Still others lend a sense of frivolity or sensuality to the garden. Illustrated with superb photographs, Plant Personalities will inspire any gardener to see the unique character in every plant.
Five stars as a gift; far fewer as a practical guide:
First, I think this would be a marvelous gift for a gardener. The color photos are lush and lovely as the plants themselves and the text entertains -- at least, it would entertain gardeners. Unfortunately for me, I picked up this book because I thought it would contain more than the generalizations (prickly customers, drama queens, and seductive sophisticates) of the categories. You can see the problem immediately: one gardener's "dainty and detailed" is another's "gatecrasher". This is an interesting idea to play with and the close-up photos provide an opportunity to get to know a number of plants (though you should not expect anything very exotic here), but I think the book was not intended to be deep in information and, indeed, it is not. If one were to say that this is a "novel" approach, by contrast I might say that although I am happy to receive such things as gifts, I prefer to spend my own money on books that are more like textbooks or references. As usual, Timber Press has published a sturdy book that should hold up well. The binding is tight and the format itself is not so large as to endanger the binding. Three stars, then, which I am quite willing to have read as a metric of my own rather stodgy and bookish gardening personality.
Given as a gift , I ordered one for me.:
I love to shoot flowers, I bought the book for photos, and found text well written, and valuable. It took me 1 day after gifting it to order one for myself
| Author: | Carol Klein | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Dewey Decimal Number: | 635.9 | | EAN: | 9780881927016 | | Format: | Illustrated | | ISBN: | 0881927015 | | Number Of Pages: | 176 | | Publication Date: | 2004-12-01 |
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