Summer Garden Book Roundup

This year, Timber press heats things up in your summer garden with three new titles relevant to Washington, DC, gardeners. These books are sure to help you forget the blazing summer sun, add enjoyment and inspiration to your vacation, and introduce new techniques to your personal gardening style. Enjoy!

“Pots in the Garden”
Expert Design & Planting Techniques
by Ray Rogers, photos by Richard Hartlage
Timber Press
$29.95
Perennial Philadelphia Flower Show winner and lifelong horticulturist Ray Rogers has taken the entire mystique out of container gardening. His book, “Pots in the Garden,” is a gardener’s road map to creating successful, attractive and well-designed container gardens for your outdoor spaces.

Many gardeners rush out in the spring and purchase plants and containers to beautify their entries, patios, balconies and rooftop decks. By July, the containers are overgrown with plants that were once complimentary but are now struggling as aggressive competitors. The failure rate of container gardens does not have to be high. In fact with “Pots in the Garden,” the reader is gently and intelligently guided through all aspects of container gardening.

Perhaps the most intelligent advice is don’t give up. When gardening in containers, you can always swap out pots, plants and designs. You have the flexibility to move plants around to suit a garden’s microclimate. “Mix and match, trial and error, and wait (or not) and see: all of these techniques apply to gardening in general and to container growing in particular.”

“A Pattern Garden”
The Essential Elements of Garden Making
by Valerie Easton
Timber Press
$34.95
Valerie Easton, a regular contributor to numerous gardening publications and the weekly gardening columnist for the Seattle Times, has put together the quintessential garden-design book. By identifying 14 distinct pattern that occur in gardens, Easton has demystified garden design and made it easier for anyone to plan and implement a truly satisfying garden. “ ‘A Pattern Garden’ articulates the difference between a garden that is merely well-tended and one that appeals to the real human needs for beauty, respite and meaning, and gives us the tools for creating our own highly satisfying garden spaces.” Whether this is your first attempt at gardening or you happen to be a perennial gardener, this book will add to your sense of creating great spaces that appeal to you and others.

“The Encyclopedia of Grasses for Livable Landscapes”
by Rick Darke
Timber Press
$59.95
Widely recognized for his extensive work with, and advocacy of, grasses, Rick Darke has compiled a grass handbook for this and many decades to come. In recent years, grasses have broken out of the arboretums and botanic gardens to become one of the more widely-used plant elements. This is not surprising since our lives are becoming increasingly demanding, and we want low-maintenance gardens with year-round interest. Grasses are tough, beautiful and diverse. They can fill the spaces in our city tree-boxes or be used as elaborate living borders in our country homes. They are drought resistant and have over 60 genera and 414 species. They come in different sizes and shapes and can be bold and grand like the Pampas grasses, or ultra-fine textured like the Mexican feather grass. This book is for anyone who has ever slowed to take in the beauty of grass plumes in the summer sun, the autumn wind or the still of a frigid winter day. This truly inspiring, well-presented guide to growing grasses is sure to be as important tomorrow as it is unique and timely today.