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Monday Miscellany: Book Review Madness
Well, it’s book review week here at North Coast Gardening, which means I’ll have some reviews and excerpts of books that I’ve enjoyed recently. But before you read about my favorites, here’s some book excitement from some of my Twitter friends: Fern Richardson from Life on the Balcony shares her favorite tips from Garden Up!:…
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Celebrating Vertical Gardening with Garden Up!
Two of my favorite bloggers, Rebecca Sweet and Susan Morrison, have just released a book on vertical gardening called Garden Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces. When I heard they were writing it I was so excited, because gaining height without adding width is a design challenge that is present in so…
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Monday Miscellany: Book Review Excitement
Loads of exciting book-related things happening lately, from new entries to the Five Books meme, to book launch parties for The Edible Front Yard and Garden Up!, plus our friends over at Garden Rant becoming regulars at Kirkus Reviews! Starting us off, I want to share a garden book review blog called Gardening by the…
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Five Books: for Beginning Gardeners
Newbie gardeners are greeted to the gardening book section by thick encyclopedias on Crocus, for example, or how to design in specific styles. But when I was a new gardener, I didn’t know what style I wanted to design in. And I was still working my way through the common, easy-to-grow plants – I think…
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Five Books: If You Want to Turn Your Passion for Gardening Into a Career
So many of my fellow landscapers came to it after an unsatisfying career in another field. While turning your passion into your career has a lot of pitfalls (what do you do for fun when you’ve been working 60-hour weeks at your hobby?), landscaping is a fantastic career just because there are so many directions…
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Five Books: for Pacific Northwest Gardeners
Carrying on with the Five Books meme, here are my top favorites for Pacific Northwest gardeners: The Sunset Western Garden Book If by some magic or miracle you haven’t yet got a copy of this, go out right now and get it. This is the “duh” addition to the list; it’s usually the first book…
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Book Review of Energy-Wise Landscape Design by Sue Reed
Reading this thorough design primer is like getting to chat with a knowledgeable and friendly expert for a few hours about how to create effective windbreaks, conserve on your heating and cooling bills through landscaping, create new energy sources to reduce your dependence on the grid, and generally preserve and conserve at every step in…
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Five Books: Essential Reads for Gardeners
I recently found the website Five Books: The Best Five Books on Everything, where they ask experts to name the five books in their field that everyone should read. (EDIT Jan 20: Looks like FiveBooks.com just got purchased by TheBrowser.com, but there are still links to the Five Books articles up.) I love to read.…
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Book Review of Plant-Driven Design by Lauren and Scott Ogden
In landscape design, there seems to be a constant gentle friction between gardeners who see a landscape as a setting for plants to shine, and people who come from a more architectural standpoint and see the plants themselves as secondary to the design aims. You can tell from the title, Plant-Driven Design: Creating Gardens That…
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Book Review of Japanese Maples by Vertrees and Gregory
Book Review of Japanese Maples: The Complete Guide to Selection and Cultivation, by J.D. Vertrees and Peter Gregory, Fourth Edition, Timber Press As a landscape designer, a critical part of my work is in recognizing the subtle differences between plants and what they do, so that I can play off the most unique attributes and…
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Book Review of Lavender: The Grower’s Guide by Virginia McNaughton
Lavender: The Grower’s Guide is a thorough and easy-to-use encyclopedia of the lavender varieties most common in production today. Virginia McNaughton begins the book strongly by discussing how to grow lavender, how to prune it, the special requirements of lavenders, which ones grow well in containers, and the pests and diseases that can strike lavender…