A personal selection and authoritative guide to the most beautiful bulbs on the earth. The publication of Anna Pavord's guide to her favorite bulbs, corms, and tubers is an event to be celebrated. Here, the world famous author of The Tulip, selects 540 favorite bulbs, more bulbs than and gardener could grow in a lifetime. Easy-to-grow, generally inexpensive and highly accessible, bulbs are readily available from many outlets. From acis, anemones and arums to zantedeschia, zephyranthes, and zigadenus, this alphabetical collection provides inspiration, insight, anecdote, and helpful advice. Special photography reveals the glory of each bulb, explaining flowering size, height, planting depth and requires soil and climatic conditions. This gorgeous book, a complete deluxe package, will appeal to gardeners as the world's most authoritative and affordable reference work on bulbs.
From forty-five years of experience in collecting and cultivating bulbs, Thad Howard offers expert advice about hundreds of little-known bulbs and common species, varieties, and hybrids that grow well in warm climates.
In a series of chapters that takes us through the gardening year, Scott Ogden profiles hundreds of choice bulbs that thrive in the hot, humid summers and mild winters of the South. This new edition has been updated and significantly expanded with new information and photographs.
For those tired of high-maintenance and short-lived plants, Chris Wiesinger, "The Bulb Hunter" shares his knowledge of versatile, sustainable, and low-maintenance bulbs. HEIRLOOM BULBS FOR TODAY introduces the best of the bulb world, addressing common questions and explaining the characteristics, history and ways to use each bulb, whether in the landscape or the home. Chris teams with landscape designer and award winning author Cherie Foster Colburn (OUR SHADOW GARDEN) to offer an innovative look at old-fashioned flower bulbs. While most garden guides simply tell the culture of the plant, HEIRLOOM BULBS FOR TODAY also tells the culture of the people who grew the plant, unearthing each bulb's past and those who loved it. Gorgeous botanical illustrations and vivid photographs by South African artists Loela Barry and Johan Kritzinger add rich flavor to featured bulbs found flowering with abandon in historic gardens, homes, and cemeteries, transporting readers on their own bulb hunt. With undeniable Southern charm, Wiesinger describes the adventures he encounters while collecting these old favorites, dubbed the "comfort food" of the plant world. Show More Show Less.
Dubbed the Bulb Hunter in a 2006 New York Times feature story, Chris Wiesinger took his passion for bulbs to vacant lots, abandoned houses, cemeteries, and construction sites throughout the South in search of botanical survivors whose descendants had never seen the inside of a big-box chain store. The vintage specimens Wiesinger sought came from hardy, historic stock, adapted to human neglect and hot climates, reappearing faithfully over decades without care or cultivation. Traveling back roads, speaking to strangers, looking for the telltale color of a remnant iris or lily, Wiesinger started digging, then began trying to grow and share the bulbs he collected. From its humble beginnings on an East Texas sweet potato farm, his Southern Bulb Company has now grown into a full-fledged business known throughout the world, propagating and selling the rare, tough, heritage plants Wiesinger still seeks out and champions. Nicknamed “Flower” by his fellow cadets at Texas A&M University, Wiesinger relates his adventures in bulb hunting, telling stories of the bulbs he has discovered and weaving in his own life story as a student, plantsman, and small business owner. He then teams with veteran horticulturist William C. Welch to provide advice on how to grow and appreciate the bulbs that have been rescued and reintroduced. This “primer” gives gardeners information on what bulbs to grow where, when to plant them and when they bloom, and how to incorporate them with other plants in the landscape. Finally, Welch describes how bulbs have enhanced his personal gardens and brought him and Wiesinger together in the common cause of heirloom gardening. Entertaining, informative, and loaded with beautiful photographs, The Bulb Hunter is sure to be a favorite of gardeners and plant lovers everywhere.
You can grow tulips, daffodils, crocuses, and the rest of their spring-blooming brethren indoors, all winter long, when the view outside your window reveals snow, sleet, or icy rain. Instead, imagine your windowsills filled with an array of dazzling flowers. In this informative and entertaining book, famed bulb forcer Art Wolk humorously reveals the secrets he's used for three decades to win silver cups and baskets of blue ribbons. And, he admits, bulb forcing requires no Green Thumb. As long as you can put soil and bulbs in a pot without mortally wounding yourself, you'll succeed. Wolk's book is filled with laugh-out-loud humor and more than 350 glorious photos that show you exactly how to produce your own indoor, wintertime flower show every year.
This book crystallizes and extends the important work Wiebe Bijker has done in the last decade to found a full-scale theory of sociotechnical change that describes where technologies come from and how societies deal with them. Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs integrates detailed case studies with theoretical generalizations and political analyses to offer a fully rounded treatment both of the relations between technology and society and of the issues involved in sociotechnical change. The stories of the the safety bicycle, the first truly synthetic plastic, and the fluorescent light bulb—each a fascinating case study in itself—reflect a cross section of time periods, engineering and scientific disciplines, and economic, social, and political cultures. The bicycle story explores such issues as the role of changing gender relationships in shaping a technology; the Bakelite story examines the ways in which social factors intrude even in cases of seemingly pure chemistry and entrepreneurship; and the fluorescent bulb story offers insights into the ways in which political and economic relationships can affect the form of a technology. Bijker's method is to use these case studies to suggest theoretical concepts that serve as building blocks in a more and more inclusive theory, which is then tested against further case studies. His main concern is to create a basis for science, technology, and social change that uncovers the social roots of technology, making it amenable to democratic politics.