Garden with the confidence of a winner!
Proven Winners is America's #1 plant brand. And now they are sharing their expert plant knowledge and creative design ideas in their first book, The Proven Winners Garden Book. This definitive guide starts with lessons on how to prepare a space, tips on choosing the right design, and a primer on buying the right plants.
Twelve garden plans provide simple design ideas that will add curb appeal to your home garden. They include:
• A welcoming entryway
• A butterfly and pollinator garden
• A fragrant flower garden
• A shady summertime retreat
• A deer-resistant garden
There are an additional twenty-five container recipes that add color and pizzazz to gardens of all sizes-even on balconies and patios. The creative combinations include holiday themes, solutions for shade and other concerns, poolside ideas, and much more. Proven Winners is known for being the best source for reliable annuals, perennials, and shrubs. Their first book offers all the know‑how you need to grow a great home garden. Ruth Rogers Clausen has received the GWA Gold Award, and she was the horticulture editor for Country Living Gardener for more than seven years.
Thomas Christopher writes about horticulture for The New York Times, The Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, and Horticulture Magazine. He is also a columnist for House & Garden and a contributing editor at Martha Stewart Living. Introduction
With this book, beautifying your home landscape has never been easier-or more economical and fun. Forget all the complications of gardening rules and jargon; we've simplified this process to a series of straightforward recipes, like your favorite cookbook. Follow the step-by-step instructions and you'll find that success comes just as surely outdoors as in the kitchen, as you quickly transform the ordinary into something truly special.
As with cooking, the success of your garden depends on the quality of the ingredients you use. Proven Winners has devoted years to collecting and testing plants, seeking varieties that not only produce the most attractive flowers and foliage, but which are also the most reliable and durable performers. All are outstandingly vigorous, disease-free, and the best of their kind in coping with stresses such as extreme heat and drought. The plants in these recipes are also easy to grow: most are compact, and so can stand on their own without troublesome staking and with a minimum of pruning.
You'll find detailed introductions to creating both in-ground gardens and gardens in containers. Part one starts with the basics-selecting a spot, designing a garden, shopping for plants-that apply to any type of garden and any type of gardener. The second part is dedicated to landscape gardening. Before delving into the twelve recipes, with themes such as fragrant combinations and shady retreats, read up on everything from preparing the soil to keeping your garden healthy down the road. Next, the container section: a trove of twenty-five enticing designs along with the container-specific know-how for getting your plants happily situated in their pots (or urns, baskets, bowls, and more). Simple planting schematics and plentiful photos combine to present a full picture of how to do it and what beauty the end result will offer.
Interwoven throughout the book are tips for saving money and techniques that make the job easier-tricks of the trade that we learned from the pros. We understand that your time and money are both precious. With this book, you'll economize on both, almost certainly earning back the cost of this book and more with the first landscape project you undertake. To that point, a variety of studies have found that good landscaping can add 10 percent or more to the value of your home. So while enhancing your own satisfaction and pleasure in your home, you can at the same time boost its curb appeal.
