Contrary to popular opinion, an environmentally friendly garden does not have to be a dull, predictable garden. This practical handbook considers the choices we face when giving a conventional garden a green makeover or designing a sustainable garden from scratch. It presents pragmatic advice laced with a spark of innovation and style.
With practical advice, projects and plant directory, this step-by-step guide helps you design your own Japanese oasis in one of the five classic styles - pond, dry, tea, stroll and courtyard - each brought to life with step-by-step projects. It includes photographs that feature inspiring locations, step-by-step sequences and colour illustrations.
Environmentally friendly buildings are a must for our future. Among the many new ideas for buildings are green roofs. But what is a green roof? How do they work? Why are individuals and businesses installing them? And how do you install and maintain a green roof?
Offers a broad perspective on how to make the best of the precious resource of water in your garden. This book reveals how conserving water in your garden does not necessarily restrict the gardener to dry gravel beds, but can also involve lawns, leafy crops and flowery borders.
Shows exactly how to collect, save, and cultivate the seeds from more than 300 vegetables, herbs, fruits, flowers, trees, and shrubs, as well as the techniques and timing for gathering viable seeds that vary from plant to plant. This book discusses these differences while thoroughly explaining every step in the seed-saving process.
Pruning helps keep trees, shrubs, and other plants healthy and beautiful. With clear advice, a brow sable format, a friendly tone, and how-to illustrations, this book provides what a homeowner needs to safely achieve attractive, long-lasting, and healthy plants.
Terrarium Craft features 50 original designs that you can re-create or use as inspiration for your own design. If you've always wanted to have a bit of nature in your own home, without the labour of a garden, Terrarium Craft will show you exactly how to create your own verdant, enchanting world.
Taking the fear out of chainsaws by emphasising safe handling practices, this resource presents 12 of the most common household chainsaw operations - such as cutting firewood, taking down small trees, trimming branches, grooming hedges, and making lumber.
RHS Pruning & Training is the new practical guide to the essential practice of pruning. It will show how to prune 200 favourite garden plants from apples to clematis at all stages of their growth, to achieve special shapes and effects, and to keep them in good health.
A garden that can withstand summer drought and does not require watering is the dream of all gardeners conscious of the need to preserve natural resources, and who wish to create a garden in harmony with the environment. This book provides answers to the questions surrounding a dry garden.
Permaculture is an important but often misunderstood method of growing food and building homes in a manner that works with nature, rather than against it, to create beautiful, healthy, and useful gardens. This guide takes the beginner through each step of the design process, so that they can apply permaculture principles to their own life.
A practical guide to greener, planet-friendly gardening. It includes garden layouts and planting plans, step-by-step techniques, a directory of 80 plants and over 500 photographs and illustrations. It shows how to reduce your garden's 'carbon footprint' and create a greener, ecologically sustainable garden by working with nature.
The urban landscape has swallowed vast swaths of prime farmland across North America. Permaculture is a practical way to apply ecological design principles to food, housing, and energy systems. This title casts garden farming as both an economic opportunity and a strategy for living well with less money.
What is sustainable gardening? This book answers these questions by explaining how it is possible to garden in a way that has a positive environmental impact upon the way we live. It focuses on established horticultural practices, showing that it is possible to be environmentally responsible, and yet still have a stunning garden display.
A practical guide to propagating your own flowers, trees, shrubs, climbers, wet-loving, bog and water plants, and vegetables and herbs. It covers the techniques including sowing seed; taking cuttings; dividing plants; growing suckers and offsets; layering; creating extra bulbs, tubers and corms; and, grafting two plants together.
Rain gardens encompass all possible elements that can be used to capture, channel, divert and make the most of the rain and snow that fall on a property. This work on sustainable water management schemes includes solutions for small and large-scale implementations and utilizing research with state-of-the-art case studies from all over the world.
This guide provides detailed ideas on damp garden management, plans for every type of soil and situation, nearly 20 specially tailored lists to help with planting in various conditions, and descriptions of over 1000 suitable plants for making the most of damp ground.
Country folk know that planning their work in harmony with the rhythms of the moon produces better crops. It's that easy. They get higher yields and better flavour in vegetables. This guide offers the information you need to know about the daily influence of the moon and the planets in the garden.
A guide to biodynamic gardening techniques. It offers tips on: favourable times for planting, harvesting and growing; ways of combating pests and diseases; building soil fertility - crop change and rotation; and how planets and stars affect plant growth.
Focuses on the dry gardens that work. This book shows how to create illusions of water, how to care for dry climate plants, and create the right conditions (including mulches to conserve water, plant groupings, preparation of plants) and drainage for the times when it suddenly pours and pours.
Making compost isn't just simple and satisfying, it saves you spending money on expensive soil conditioners and mulches. There's no need for fancy gadgets. This title lets you discover how to build a simple bin, find the best tools for the job, and learn what type of mix is perfect for the size of your garden.
With fabulous palms, big bold banana leaves, colour flowers and flamboyant foliage, exotic gardens never fail to fascinate and excite a gardener. This book introduces the mouth-watering array of hardy and tender plants that can be used to create jungle-style landscapes in every garden.
Guides homeowners through each step of dry-laid stonework. Have a sloped garden? This work helps you to build a retaining wall with built-in benches and flowers growing out through the stone joints. Crave the soothing sound of water? Try the waterfall project constructed with two stone-lined pools.
Offers inspiration and practical ideas for creating sustainable, waterwise and dry gardens, with projects, planting plans and more than 400 photographs. This title analyses classic garden styles that are suitable for different gardening conditions, from the Desert Garden to the Gravel Garden and the Jungle Garden.
Environmental friendliness may be the biggest lure of a green roof, but other benefits include noise insulation, more wildlife, an option to have a garden in a seemingly unfeasible situation, and aesthetically pleasing views from other parts of the house and garden.
A true rock garden is a specialized habitat that allows the gardener to grow plants that do not flourish anywhere else. This book deals with building rock gardens in various parts of North America. It covers topics such as rock placement, materials, and planting and maintenance.
In this text, John Ferguson and Berkhard Mucke describe a unique approach to gardening in which the rhythm of nature is used to divide the year into nine seasons - pre-spring, early spring, spring, early summer, midsommer, later summer, early autumn, autumn and winter.
Vertical gardening shrinks the amount of "floor" space needed and focuses on climbing plants that are less prone to insects, diseases, and animal pests. The author has tried and tested thousands of varieties of vegetables, flowers, and fruits and recommends the best plants for space-saving vertical gardening.
Traditionally the nutrients, water and support plants need have been provided by soil, but hydroponics allow plants to grow and thrive by gaining the perfect balance of nutrients from a regulated solution. This guide offers step-by-step instruction on how to build you own hydroponic system.
A comprehensive practical guide to pruning trees, shrubs, roses and climbers. It features an A-Z approach on over 800 plants with practical, step-by-step images to show you where and how to make pruning cuts, as well as information on advanced techniques such as coppicing, topiary and pergola-training.
Enables you to get the best from your garden using Nature to help you: choose the perfect plants for your soil and situation; feed them with your own natural compost; and attract bees and butterflies. This book contains scores of full-colour photographs.
This text offers information on gardening in polytunnels and cloches - the low cost alternative to greenhouses. Practical information is included on the construction or purchase of polytunnels, methods of cultivation, and problems from pests and diseases that may strike beneath the plastic.
You won't have to get up in the middle of the night to sow your carrots! Country folk know that planning their work in harmony with the rhythms of the moon produces better crops. It's that easy. This guide computes what you need to know about the daily influence of the moon and the planets in the garden.
Encourages gardeners to pay attention to the beauty of miniature landscapes. This book introduces one of the glories of Japanese gardens into American designs. It describes mosses on rocks and walls, in containers, and as a ground cover, and presents a gallery of moss species.