Specialized Books

With few color photographs but many excellent line drawings and lucid writing, the author covers all the essentials. The techniques presented are both practical and innovative. The chapters on shaping, soil, and styling are exceptional. Only Naka's two volume set rivals this publication.

This text was the one i'd been searching for so long. I've purchased a dozen bonsai books over the years and finally found Koreshoff's book. It's straight foreward, simple, and explains so many things i'd been confused about that other bonsai books don't touch on like the philosophical purpose of the shapes of trees. Bottom line is this: you can get many bonsai books and get close to what Koreshoff has done, or you can purchase hers and be done. You won't regret it.

While this isn't an all inclusive guide to japanese gardening, its a fun and inspiring read. After reading this book I set about building my own japanse style garden; and while I didn't find myself referring to it for specifics of actually building the garden - I did find myself referring to it for motivation. Egan's self-effacing sense of humour is particularly enjoyable, as he struggles with such tribulations as moving a large rock, or dealing with a leaking pond (problems that I also found myself dealing with). I would highly recommend this book to any do-it-yourselfer thinking about building a japansese style garden.

Get this book if you have been suspicious about the hype surrounding the Zen of garden building or if you want a hilarious account of a brave amateur confronting the sham purity of Japanese garden design. But this is also a serious and wryly understated account of how to confront the task armed with the basic philosophy of the design of a garden and teahouse, and as well, a humorous introduction to the kind of characters you might meet if you go past the DIY stores to meet the suppliers.

Beautiful book with terrific color photography. For quick reference, there are descriptive charts listing food and nectar plants with perspective butterflies and/or larvae. The appendices is filled with useful information such as how to photograph butterflies, seed and plant sources, and more. An illuminating book for reading and learning.

This is a buy now book for the southern gardener who wants to encourage flocks of butterflies into their garden or who wants to know more about native plants with a butterflies view in mind. The author has extensive color pictures of the butterflies and their habits as well as cultural information about the food plants of the larvae and nector plants of the adults. She has taken beautiful pictures of the plants, butterflies, catapillar, and egg stage of almost all the butterflies she details. The information is invaluable. Many butterfly plants are so common as to be considered weeds well many of them are weeds but if you want to grow them and collect them it helps to have a color picture to identify them and cultural information about growing them. She includes layouts for garden design in each of the southern zones covered and gives alot of good organic practical gardening advice. I especially like the part where she shares her experience on how to take pictures of butterflies. Great stuff for someone who does not know alot about SLR cameras and wants an insiders advice on how to take pictures of butterflies. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in gardening with native trees and plants as well as adapted non natives who wishes to encourage butterflies in their garden.

I cannot remember when I have had so much enjoyment in reading a book about plants. This is not a simple "how to identify" work, but rather a story by and of three very knowledgeable men, scientists, traveling through the countries of Bolivia, Peru and Argentina, not as tourists, but rather than scientist. For a book which is primarily about plants, i.e. cactus, it is so much more. We get a wonderful and insightful travel story/book thrown in. As another reviewer pointed out, this could quite well have been a very boring read. This it was not! I have actually given this one three reads simply because it is fun! But, most importantly, this volume is simply packed with wonderful information about cacti, their history, their origins and environment. This work in not simply a field guide or a bunch of pretty, sterile pictures of cactus setting on a shelf photographed with a bunch of high tech gear, it actually gives information about these wonderful plants as they grow in their home environment, their natural state, the wild. The photographs are all field photographs and for field photos, quite well done. The text is very precise and easy to follow, not being over the head of the amature (such as my self) yet providing so much information to the advanced student. Discriptions are great. I did have trouble at first with the Latin names of course, but this forced be to pull out my old high school Latin books and do a bit of brushing up...this was good. All of the photographs are in color and well captioned. As an added note, Timber Press did a wonderful job on this book (I wonder if all their books are of this caliber). I wish all books were of this physical quality. Of even more importance than anything else, my knowledge of this particular plant family took a 100 percent jump in depth. For that I am grateful. I very much suggest you add this one to your library. Recommend highly.

Since I started growing my first cacti nearly 30 years ago, certain books have been of great importance for my knowledge and development, when it comes to growing and understanding cacti. But never has one single book put so many pieces together as this one! The book is just packed with knowledge and I really became overwhelmingly inspired!
The authors travel through several South American countries and habitats, diverse as they are because of the andean influence. You just want to go there and travel yourself!

After reading this book twice in a short time, I view the whole consept of cacti and environment differently. How the tectonic plates moved and forced plants and animals to evolve and adapt to the new niches and habitats, from the ancestors in Gondwana, to the first cacti in south America, later spreading into the adjoining north American continent. How the cactusgenera are related. How a cactus works.
In fact I learned too many tings to mention everything; just read the book! It could seem very technical and boring, but believe me; its not! At least if you have a relation to growing cacti. Its all in there! Highly recommended!

This little book is packed full of nice ideas. I've read it over and over and look forward to picking it up again. And I've given it often to grateful friends. Great taste is hard to beat.

This book is great! The pictures and ideas are fabulous. I really like Strong's writing style and his advice. If you are looking for a well-written, practical, and fine piece of gardening escapism, this is it! I have gotten this book at the library a number of times. I finally decided to buy it. I am now ordering a copy for my sister. Look at his other gardening too.

The book is substantive with great readable text thanks to Caroline Harbouri's translation and terrific photos and many plants I've not heard of! Olivier covers each component of mediterranean dry summer gardening with great expertise. Highly recommended.

There are plants that can survive, and even thrive, on little water. Those who live in the western United States, especially in California, Arizona, Texas, and Nevada, are going to consider this book a treasure.

The author, Filippi, even includes a useful drought resistance code ranging from 1 to 6 which will help you "choose the right plant for the right place" (p 47). Other valuable information is on soil types and when to plant

Best of all is the large section on plants, which is lavish with color photographs. No matter how well informed you are on the subject, you will likely find new plants to use in your garden, and the brilliant, color drenched photographs are simply a treat to leaf through.

Recommended.

This is an excellent book with down to earth material information. If interested in Australian species as a whole or perhaps into Eucalyptus trees, this book is a 5 star purchase.

This widely respected book is the only example I am aware of to combine botanical and naturalistic information with silvicultural and timber usage notes.
The most useful book on the subject that I am aware of.

Bomarzo is a place in central Italy. The Lord of Bomarzo in the middle part of the 1500s was a Vincino with a wife named Giulia. Vincino lived a long time after his wife died. Though he displayed a sense of melancholy throughout the rest of his life and occasional periods of depression, this cannot be attributed solely to the untimely loss of his wife. For from the garden he founded and remained involved with during his life as well as what other sketchy biographical facts there are to go on, the Lord of Bomarzo had a rather gloomy soul; though one enlivened by intellectual curiosity about diverse interests of the Renaissance, including classical culture, mythology, alchemy, literature, and sculpture. The Garden at Bomarzo was not particularly a memorial to the Lord's departed wife, but rather something of a museum of sculptural representations of the Lord's varied intellectual interests.

A war elephant with its trunk curled around a soldier, a small classical theater, a temple, large stone acorn, the three-headed mythological dog Cerberus, and a dragon being attacked by lions are among the statuary of the Renaissance garden. The "riddle" of the garden is posed by inscriptions in Latin in prominent spots of many of the statutes. "The cave and the fountain free one from all serious thought" and "I want to tell you, and make you in amazement/purse your lips and raise your eyebrows" are two of these. Sheeler--who has a background in classics studies--does not solve the riddle, but to the extent possible makes sense of the garden's diverse objects and cryptic statements. The Renaissance-era personality of the Lord Vincino go a long way toward this explanation. "The ambivalences and the attractive intelligence in his own character find an expression in the variety and puzzling allusiveness of the [garden's] works...." The Lord was a respected soldier who also had leanings toward "Epicurean pacifism"; he sought out the company of his social superiors for intellectual stimulation while chaffing against the social conventions of the time; the balance between his sensuality and intellectuality shifted at different times of his life. The Lord of Bomarzo shows something of the modern spirit of individuality and independence arising in the Renaissance, while still referring to medieval symbolisms and beliefs for expressing itself. The many color photographs, several full-page and a couple double-page, of the moss-covering, in some cases partly deteriorated statutes of the Bomarzo garden are a treat in themselves of classical and baroque statuary.

The Sacred Wood at Bomarzo, Italy is arguably the most puzzling and fascinating garden in all of Europe. Created in the mid-sixteenth century by Vincino Orsini, Lord of Bomarzo, as a tribute to his late beloved wife, Giulia, it lies in a wooded valley below the Orsini palace so that Vincino could look out upon his spectacular composition.

Many of us have visited and strolled the more formal gardens - the Farnese or Borghese. This, the Bosco dei Mostri (Monsters Wood) as it is also called, is a far cry from sculptured hedges and carefully laid out pathways. It is the home of enormous, often grotesque creatures - a two-faced herm, the Mask of Madness, and the Mouth of Hell. These denizens of the garden confound most, and it is left to Classic scholar Jessie Sheeler to explicate not only the statuary but also the carved texts accompanying them.

The garden is considered to be a reflection of Vincino's thinking, perhaps his search for meaning. Fortunately, many of his letters are still in existence, which give us an inkling of his ideas. We can read his comment to a friend, "I prefer living here among these woods to being immersed in the falsities and vanities of the courts, especially that of Rome."

While a precise account of who the man was is probably lost to us, his garden remains an incredible sight after having been restored some 25 years ago. Mark Edward Smith's photographs are stunning and The Garden At Bomarzo is both a treasure and a puzzle for both historians and garden enthusiasts.

- Gail Cooke

As a landscape architect, I find this book is an excellent resource for hardscape ideas for the garden. The book is divided into the basics planes of the garden ... floors, boundaries & dividers, overhead structures, etc. The wonderful photographics are invaluable as well as the discriptions telling the history, uses and construction of the site elements. I would recommend this book to professionals and weekend gardeners for its inspiration and knowledge.

I have owned this book for several years now and still use it regularly as a design reference. The examples and illustrations are pretty much all classics whether historic, traditional, or contemporary, and always seem fresh to my eye each time I pick up the book.

I just loved all the information and pictures it has on pruning your evergreen and trees. I found it very informative.

Visually appealing with its hundreds of bright color photographs and encyclopedic in its scope and content, this reference also has the clarity of organization and practicality of a garden handbook. Each of the listings of the hundreds of Japanese plants gives notes on appearance, cultivation, and use (e. g., ground cover, attractive spring flowers, potted plant) of the particular plant along with the Japanese and English names, interesting points, and related plants. As noted in the Foreword by E. Charles Nelson, the Japanese, with their insular culture, had no desire to go abroad seeking foreign plants--nor did they need to with the variety available in their homeland. Yet American gardeners and others readily took to Japanese plants when Japan opened up to the West, and continue to do so increasingly in recent years. This attractive, complete, useful reference fully satisfies an interest in the variety of Japanese plants. Both authors have extensive backgrounds and solid reputations in horticulture.