The Natural Shade Garden by Ken Druse

Product Details

Synopsis

Ken Druse's Natural Garden Guides:
Award-winning gardening expert Ken Druse offers a personal selection of 80 ideal plants for the natural gardener, drawn from his best-selling classic The Natural Shade Garden.

This companion guide is illustrated throughout with 130 of Druse's spectacular color photo-graphs. All-new descriptions discuss the origins of each plant, supply the pronunciation of their Latin names, and offer information on their ultimate size, time of bloom, light and soil requirements, cold hardiness, and special interest, such as colorful berries or butterfly attraction.

Here, too, is indispensable advice for using these plants with companions to create striking designs. Each section has an original introduction presenting valuable techniques for making your own natural garden. An appendix gives mail-order sources.

In 80 Great Natural Shade Garden Plants Ken Druse selects the best plants for natural gardening in the shade: Ornamental Shrubs  ¸  Perennials for Flowers  ¸  Perennials for Foliage  ¸  Ground Covers and Vines  ¸  The Best Hostas  ¸  The Best Ferns

Annotation

Award-winning garden photographer and writer Ken Druse, author of The Natural Garden, covers every aspect of gardening in the shade. He creates gardens that not only survive with little direct sunlight--four hours or less--but that thrive. The book covers all types of shade (wet or dry, partial or dense) and explains how to make the most of shady areas. 420 full-color photographs.

Publishers Weekly

While the idea of shade gardening has cropped up from time to time in garden manuals, Druse ( The Natural Garden ) effectively defines a new American horticultural aesthetic with this enthusiastic volume. He brings clear, engaging writing and gorgeous color photographs (his own) to bear on just about every category of plant and terrain relevant to his subject, and explores the fine differences between ``partial shade,'' ``light shade,'' ``dappled shade'' and ``deep shade'' with an appetite that will hearten any gardener whose plot has a tree or a tall building nearby. Druse encourages American gardeners to ``live with shade,'' cultivating native plants that are naturally adapted to shady habitats, augmented by choice species from around the world or hybrids that blend in. He begins with a general discussion of natural shade habitats and shade plant features, and goes on to cover the use of containers, water and other special elements appropriate for shade gardens. The book is especially helpful for its photo essay on exemplary American shade gardens, for its state-by-state list of gardens to visit, for its suggested reading list and for its extensive plant, seed and book source listings. The Natural Shade Garden may very well be the definitive work in the area of shade gardening, which will become increasingly important as Americans seek to grow plant species in their natural habitats even as these are transformed by development. It should be welcome to gardeners in the cities, suburbs and the country alike. Druse's own beautiful plot near downtown Brooklyn, N . Y . , is featured throughout. (Mar . )

Biography

Ken Druse is an internationally renowned author and gardening expert, an award-winning photographer, and the acknowledged founder of the American natural gardening movement. He has been the gardening editor at House Beautiful magazine since 1979, and for three years he was a guest presenter on The Victory Garden. He has won three Quill & Trowel awards (from the Garden Writers Association of America) for Best Writing, Best Photography, and Best Overall Product for The Natural Garden and The Natural Habitat Garden. He lives and gardens in New Jersey.