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Category: Books on Gardening & Gardens

Recommended specialist books, monographs, historic gardens and data sources.

Brilliant Garden Colour

Brilliant Garden Colour

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Colour for adventurous Gardeners by Christopher LLoyd

Colour to Attract Book Worms

  • My personal favourite plants for colour tend towards the bright, brash and bold of Dahlias, Roses, Gladioli and even Gerbera.
  • I do not have much of an eye for harmony or hazy, pastel shades but go for in your face hot colours that form part of my Shock and Awe campaign.
  • Christopher Lloyd may educate me with his book on adventurous gardeners use of colour but we will see.
  • In the meantime I will keep growing my brash coloured Dahlias.

Cactus Dahlia

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Topiary Tips and Sites to Visit

Topiary Tips and Sites to Visit

Some evergreen shrubs lend themselves to topiary and simple sculpture shapes. From simple Box hedges as knot gardens to large geometric shapes you can train and prune to get effects with a large range of plants and shrubs.

Good Plants to Start
Yew (Taxus) is a traditional topiary subject that stands hard pruning with it’s fine textured needles and moderate growth rates.
Juniper is a fine textured evergreen with tree, shrub and prostrate forms that respond to pruning.
Holly (Ilex) is a glossy leaved evergreen with various leaf forms depending on variety. It is slow growing and can be trimmed quite hard.
Box (Boxus) is useful for smaller sculpted shapes needing fine detail. It is slow growing.
Cupressus are often used for spiral shapes or cloud pruning.
Bay (Laurel nobilis) has coarse aromatic leaves that are popular for training as a round-headed standard.

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Bright Indoor Bromeliads

Bright Indoor Bromeliads

Try a bromide ‘oops’ I mean a Bromeliad.

bromeliad

This Bromeliad is a relative of the pineapple and as it is easy to grow indoors it makes a fine house plant. There are a wide range of Bromeliads and a society dedicated to there culture the Bromeliad Society

Bromeliad Tips

  • Grow the Bromeliads for their coloured leaves that spring from the plants center.
  • If flowers are wanted try a dose of epsom salts or magnesium sulphate as this promotes healthy growth, cell structure and the production of chlorophyll.
  • As the inflorescence or coloured spike starts to go brown cut it down to encourage off sets called ‘pups’ and get a new generation of plants.
  • It can be good fun growing from seed as different Bromeliads pollinate one another and you can’t be sure what you will get.
  • For water holding Bromeliads keep the center topped up with soft water.
  • For more data try a reference book  on Bromeliads

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Fungi the Good the Bad and the Evil

Fungi the Good the Bad and the Evil

Fungus is all around your garden and we and the garden are better for it. Fungus is a natural process that helps rot down dead plant matter and sometimes produces stunning fungi.

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The first frost of this winter may have turned most fungi fruit to mush but you can brush up with a good book.

Book Cover Identify Mushrooms

Mushrooms and toadstools have a good season in 2014 due to mild weather in October. Like bracket fungi they produce large fruit-bodies as reproductive organs above ground and are called macro-fungi. Some are edible whist others hallucinogenic or deadly poison. The fungus proper is the mycelium a web of of thread-like growth known as spawn in mushroom growing.

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More Gardening Books for Kids

More Gardening Books for Kids

Last month I listed three popular gardening books for children based on my observations at RHS library. Here are some other books that can be bought from Amazon by clicking on the cover.

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‘Grow It Eat It’ is a book for adults and kids to work on together.

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‘Starting Gardening’ sets out simple gardening skills in a fun manner.

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If you think gardeners are getting younger then look at this Activity book for 3-5 year olds .
‘…All the activities are designed to develop important preschool skills and are based on the Areas of Learning for under-fives recommended by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.’ I am in favour of Kids learning but do we need gardening on the under 5’s curriculum?
I recently spent six months voluteering at the RHS library. I was amazed at the enthusiasm and interest of children in books and garden related matters.
Below is just a small selection of books that may make unexpected stocking fillers for Christmas.

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‘Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots: Gardening Together with Children’ by Sharron Lovejoy includes themed gardens like the “Pizza Patch” and the “Moon Garden”, and a list of the top 20 plants for children.

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‘The Playground Potting Shed: A Foolproof Guide to Gardening with Children’ by Dominic Murphy will inspire young people to get gardening whether at home or at school.

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The RHS starts off with the ever popular Sunflower on the cover of ‘Ready, Steady, Grow’. The book includes details of quick and easy garden projects

Books can be ordered from Amazon by clicking on the images above.

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Tips for Dark Winter Gardening

Tips for Dark Winter Gardening

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What can gardeners do in the cold wet months of December and January? The soil will probably be cold and wet as so will be the weather particularly if you live in the north of England.
Stay warm and dry and do all the cleaning and maintenance jobs you have avoided. When the growing season starts in earnest you wont have the time.

One tip for indoors is to invest in a ‘blue light’ or natural light bulb. This can con plants into thinking the days are a bit longer and the light levels a bit brighter.

A top ten tips

  1. Curl up with a good internet connection and browse away on the host of gardening web sites including Gardenerstips.
  2. Ask Father Christmas for a gardening book on your favourite subject or by a popular set of authors like Matthew Biggs, John Cushnie, Bob Flowerdew, and Anne Swithinbank.
  3. Plan your garden campaign for the coming seasons. Record what you want to achieve and the actions that will help you achieve it.
  4. Order your seeds and summer bulbs from a quality supplier.
  5. Check your over wintering plants, cuttings and stored vegetables.

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Architectural Yucca Plants

Architectural Yucca Plants

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For architectural plants we seem to think of spiky leaves like Cordylines, Phormiums and Yuccas. If you are keen to understand the differences and a bit of history of each species try ‘Architectural Plants What to Grow and How to Grow it’

If you just want shape and form in your garden try some Yuccas which have exotic foliage and then flower like a lily.

yucca-flowers

Yucca plants are succulent and retain moisture in the leaf and trunk. Read more about Succulents.

Yucca are easy to care for

Yucca are long lived plants.

Repot your Yucca every few years with fresh compost.

Read about Exotic plant books on Garden Products

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Why Gardeners Need Latin and Romans

Why Gardeners Need Latin and Romans

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) think that a bit of Latin is useful for Gardeners but so is weed killer. But what did the Romans ever do for gardeners? Well they educated the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus who began consistently using a one-word “trivial name” together with a generic name in a system of binomial nomenclature for all plants.
Moving on 250 years and 3000 plant names are worthy of exploration as they give a backbone to our gardening language.

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‘ RHS Latin for Gardeners: Over 3,000 Plant Names Explained and Explored’ Royal Horticultural Society and Lorraine Harrison

Amazon would say ‘RHS Latin for Gardeners is an informative, entertaining and beautifully illustrated unraveling of the mysteries of botanical Latin’ or something equally vomit inducing.

As Ovid said about compost making ‘adde parvum parvo magnus acervus erit’ or in English Add a little to a little and there will be a great heap.

My favorite is ‘errare est gardanum’ to err you must be a gardener.

Plant lables
Latin on the Slate

If it was the Romans who brought wine and grapes to our shores then a big cheers!

Unusual Fruit – A Taste of the Unexpected

Unusual Fruit – A Taste of the Unexpected

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The pomegranate is a native of Iran and Pakistan. The shrub or small tree bears bright red flowers and juicy, if seedy fruit.
Even if placed in the sunniest, warmest part of the garden they will suffer in the UK but with global warming who knows.

pomegranite

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A taste of the unexpected contains details about growing and cooking Chilean guava and Szechuan pepper amongst other unusual items.
Whilst the photograph below was taken in England these bananas were only grown in the Kew garden tropical hot house.

Banana hand

Eden Project
Are these warts, fruit or just part of the trunk? sadly Eden project did not have a name on this plant

Guava Baby
Guava Baby by CeeKay’s Pix CC BY-NC 2.0 ‘Not sure if this is yummy but we stumbled upon this “face” on a guava fruit. It had eyes and a big round nose. To complete it, I stuck a piece of apple skin into his “mouth”. It was so adorable that we dressed it up too!’