A large-format, beautifully illustrated, complete guide to gardening in a California and Mediterraean-like climates, defined as ones in which winters are wet and summers are bone dry.
Now that growing your own food is back in fashion — for health, financial, and environmental reasons — Mariano Bueno gives full practical details on how to grow vegetables alongside fruit trees and a variety of aromatic, medicinal and ornamental plants and herbs. He gives the individual requirements of common garden vegetables and popular fruit trees and provides a calendar that describes how to care for the kitchen garden through the gardening year. Explaining how to meet the particular challenges of growing edible plants in a hot, dry climate, with advice on matters such as irrigation, the book will be useful for those who live in a Mediterranean area or find themselves gardening in ever-hotter, dry climates. But it is also abundant in expertise on gardening in other climatic conditions, too, and is available here to an English-speaking audience for the first time.
Mediterranean garrigue landscapes are extraordinarily beautiful: alternating mounds of silver and green, textured leaves, flashes of colour and intoxicating scents combine to delight the senses and rival any cultivated garden with half the work. This book offers inspiration and expert advice on growing the plants and adopting a new more natural way of gardening. Mediterranean plants are diverse and adapted to a wide range of environments and weather conditions. They are of course ideally suited to regions which experience long periods of seasonal drought but many will also withstand periods of high rainfall and extreme cold making this book essential reading for temperate-zone gardeners seeking the Mediterranean look. Some understanding of plant ecology is essential for success and Filippi shares his expert knowledge acquired from decades of research. How a plant interacts with its environment, other plants, and other living things indicates what it needs to flourish in a garden setting.
Dry summer, wet winter climate? This is your must have plant guide. Selecting plants suited to your climate is the first step toward a thriving, largely self-sustaining garden that connects with and supports the natural world. With gentle and compelling text and stunning photographs of plants in garden settings, Gardening in Summer-Dry Climates by Nora Harlow and Saxon Holt is a guide to native and climate-adapted plants for summer-dry, winter-wet climates of North America's Pacific coast. Knowing what these climates share and how and why they differ, you can choose to make gardens that maintain and expand local and regional biodiversity, take little from the earth that is not returned, and welcome and accommodate the presence of wildlife. With global warming, it is now even more critical that we garden in tune with climate.
Celebrated landscape architect Jean Mus designs gardens that reflect his extraordinary abilities as both an artist and a horticulturalist. Mus's lavish installations display a rich spectrum of Mediterranean influences, incorporating pottery, slate walkways, sleek water channels, and Mediterranean flora. In Mediterranean Gardens, Mus invites the reader to explore twenty of the exclusive gardens that have made him famous. Dane McDowell guides us across the artist's verdant landscapes throughout southern France and into Greece and Portugal. She divulges the stories behind Mus's gardens and peppers the text with technical and reflective anecdotes from the designer himself. The sublime photographs of Vincent Motte provide inspiration to gardeners, Mediterranean buffs, and landscape designers alike.
“A Way to Garden prods us toward that ineffable place where we feel we belong; it’s a guide to living both in and out of the garden.” —The New York Times Book Review For Margaret Roach, gardening is more than a hobby, it’s a calling. Her unique approach, which she calls “horticultural how-to and woo-woo,” is a blend of vital information you need to memorize and intuitive steps you must simply feel and surrender to. In A Way to Garden, Roach imparts decades of garden wisdom on seasonal gardening, ornamental plants, vegetable gardening, design, gardening for wildlife, organic practices, and much more. She also challenges gardeners to think beyond their garden borders and to consider the ways gardening can enrich the world. Brimming with beautiful photographs of Roach’s own garden, A Way to Garden is practical, inspiring, and a must-have for every passionate gardener.
One of the best books for beginning and experienced vegetable gardeners, this clear, straightforward, easy-to-read gardening bestseller (over 500,000 copies sold) uses organic, biodynamic methods to produce large amounts of vegetables in very small spaces. To accommodate today's lifestyles, a garden needs to fit easily into a very small plot, take as little time as possible to maintain, require a minimum amount of water, and still produce prolifically. That's exactly what a postage stamp garden does. Postage stamp gardens are as little as 4 by 4 feet, and, after the initial soil preparation, they require very little extra work to produce a tremendous amount of vegetables--for instance, a 5-by-5-foot bed will produce a minimum of 200 pounds of vegetables. When first published 40 years ago, the postage stamp techniques, including closely planted beds rather than rows, vines and trailing plants grown vertically to free up space, and intercropping, were groundbreaking. Revised for an all new generation of gardeners, this edition includes brand new information on the variety of heirloom vegetables available today and how to grow them the postage stamp way. Now, in an ever busier world, the postage stamp intensive gardening method continues to be invaluable for gardeners who wish to weed, water, and work a whole lot less yet produce so much more.
Design a succulent garden of your own, with inspiration, advice, and instructional step-by-step projects for container gardens, small-space gardens, mixed gardens, and more. You can't help but be mesmerized by the eye-catching geometric forms and jewel-toned colors of succulents. But how do you grow these beauties in your own garden? One of the only books dedicated to succulent garden design, Striking Succulent Gardens is a stylish, modern gardening book for beginners and enthusiasts alike. Known for his colorful approach and bold use of varied textures and shapes, garden designer Gabriel Frank offers practical ideas, simple concepts, stunning full-color photography, step-by-step instructions for a dozen different gardens, plant recommendations, basic succulent care, and an inspired approach to creating living art in your own garden. For those in colder climates, there is a list of cold-hardy succulents and advice for bringing container gardens indoors for the winter, making succulent gardens achievable no matter where you live. Tough, water-wise, wildly popular, and nearly indestructible, succulents will transform your outdoor space, providing gardens of every size with minimal maintenance and maximum impact.
"The traditional Mediterranean garden offers a garden that is beautiful through every season, whatever the climate, so that it can survive through the driest summers, and yet can cope with damp, rain and even frost. The low-water no-water method is for those who like their plants spirited and their flower beds exuberant. There are instructions for planting evergreens with robust, aromatic foliage, as well as low-maintenance shrubs that need no staking, watering, feeding or pruning. The book shows how tough love, not pampering, pays off, giving you a drought-proof and aromatic paradise in your own plot. Create a garden that is full of radiance and scent, with vivid flowers and foliage, and aromatic herbs - the perfect outdoor living room, whatever the weather"--Publisher's description.