The New Low-Maintenance Garden: How to Have a Beautiful, Productive Garden and the Time to Enjoy It
- ISBN13: 9781604691665
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Do you ever lament that you’d love to be able to garden more, but just don’t have the time? The demanding pace of modern life leaves little space for the pleasures of gardening. On the other hand, gardening itself could be the culprit: elaborate, traditional perennial borders; water-hungry or disease-prone plants; needy lawns; and high-maintenance plants that require staking or clipping all suck up precious hours.
Simply put, we need to start gardening in a whole new way. In this inspiring book, Val Easton shows exactly how to have a low-maintenance garden that doesn’t sacrifice style. You won’t have to give up your favorite plants or settle for expanses of ugly bark nuggets. You just have to unlearn some bad old habits and pick up some good new ones.
So, how do you go about making a “new” low-maintenance garden? First, design your garden with maintenance in mind—good-looking hardscape will both save weeding time and showcase your fav… More >>
The New Low-Maintenance Garden: How to Have a Beautiful, Productive Garden and the Time to Enjoy It
I have a large, intensely gardened yard and have been looking for ideas of how to landscape the parts of the yard that I haven’t yet gotten to in a way that would be lower maintenance. This book has lots of good ideas, photos, plant lists and tips to help. Highly recommended!
This book will be useful in a LIBRARY of garden books for a new gardener. I found the writing too atmospheric and am reminded of someone filling space with lots of words to cover up the lack of concrete facts. Design is emphasized as vital with little advice on how to modify an existing garden, system and infrastrure to be lower maintenance. The book is inconsistent, for instance, it recomends “earth friendliness” on one page and then discusses a garden in which every inch is watered by sprinklers (in Seattle) and which can be maintained easily with a leaf blower. One garden’s walls are variously described as stucco and adobe on the same page leading me to suspect sloppy editing of a thrown together book. The author prominentely features not only her own but her daughter’s garden, which I found unremarkable. I wonder about the author’s credentials as a professional when she hired someone else to design her own garden. The book emphasizes the use of experts without offering advice for DIY design and does not contain a single site plan, which would anchor the nebulous text and lovely but uninformative photos. The bottom line is that I found the book boring. Rodale’s Low-Maintenance Landscaping is more useful to begineers and experienced gardens alike.
Whether you’re looking to entertain, grow vegetables, or create a Zen cove, //The New Low-Maintenance Garden// offers ideas and resources. This helpful guide features real-life anecdotes from yards across the country. You’ll learn how an urban couple turned a tiny outdoor space into a hip place to entertain. You’ll meet a California woman who transformed the notion of front yard into an edible landscape. You’ll learn about rooftop garden solutions, water-wise landscapes, and even container growing.
If none of these sound exceptionally “new” or “low-maintenance,” author Valerie Easton readily provides the contemporary twist to each approach. She recommends techniques like growing native plants, purchasing high-quality landscape materials, and “editing” your plant varieties. Fertilizing chemicals are out; composting is in. Lawns are eliminated; raised beds are incorporated. Hardscaping, design, and structure are emphasized. “Less pruning, less watering, less fertilizing, less manipulation of the garden uses fewer resources and creates less waste,” Easton writes (page 162).
This text offers a broad overview to meet the needs of varied gardening interests. If you’re looking for photographic inspiration, key tips for garden victory, additional books and resources, or success stories from other gardeners, you’ll find it all in this well-written, easy-to-navigate guide.
Reviewed by Amber K. Stott
This is a awesome book on personalising your own garden space.At first, I thought this was going to be a boring book about vegetable gardening.Not at all,what I thought it would be.This is a very insightful gardening book,about getting the most out of your garden,by using less.There are a lot of great gardening books around.This one also enters into the art of decorating and designing your ideal garden landscape.Your garden is your shrine and your peaceful retreat.Your garden is give and take.You reap what you sow into your sacred garden.The book was so enlightening on various ways of connecting with Nature ,without leaving your backyard.Gardens are more important now then ever.They add depth to one’s character ,a sense of communion with nature and improves the happiness of others.This gardening book helps the reader work with nature,rather than pushing against the natural flow of the surrounding elements.
There are many books on this subject and I own a lot of them. I decided on this one because of the word “new” in the title; curious to know how we can do low maintenance differently. I was not disappointed. The information is presented in an easy to read format that describes gardens around the country with different zones and varied concepts. Each story is accompanied by good pictures to further explain and to inspire. Depending on the needs of the garden owners, the story may focus on less plants/more hardscape or more foliage/less flowers; but each story explains how that garden was successful. At the end of each section, the author sets out a great list of resources to further your education: books, videos, websites.
Throughout the chapters there are recommendations on how to incorporate sustainable aspects in your garden; how to attract wildlife; how to enjoy your garden without spending hours working in it. The format is great. You can view just the pictures and associated text and learn a lot; the main text is divided by gardens so it is easy to flip around if you want to read about your type; and the writing is well written and informative–specific plants are recommended in each topic to help with pulling together the “look”. This is one of the best garden books I’ve purchased to date — it has inspired me to complete my one acre garden — believing that it can be maintained without hours of daily work.