This book contains detailed information about each vegetable, including its botanical classification, flower structure and means of pollination, required population size, isolation distance, techniques for caging or hand-pollination, and also the proper methods for harvesting, drying, cleaning, and storing the seeds.Seed to Seed is widely acknowledged as the best guide available for home gardeners to learn effective ways to produce and store seeds on a small scale. The author has grown seed crops of every vegetable featured in the book, and has thoroughly researched and tested all of the techniques she recommends for the home garden.This newly updated and greatly expanded Second Edition includes additional information about how to start each vegetable from seed, which has turned the book into a complete growing guide. Local knowledge about seed starting techniques for each vegetable has been shared by expert gardeners from seven regions of the United States-Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast/Gulf Coast, Midwest, Southwest, Central West Coast, and Northwest.

    

    Unlike other authors who focus almost entirely on practical design elements of gardening, Messervy beckons you to identify the atmosphere and mood of a very personal garden you can create. She tells readers to think back to those places in memory that have given them the greatest joy and ease, either as children or as adults, and to use those memories in creating a retreat or garden of the mind in one's own backyard. Messervy asks readers to feel the space around them and to use their hearts and minds to figure out how to turn this imagined space into a reality. Culling from archetypes and spiritual insights, guided by the practical methods of hands-in-the-dirt gardening, the result is a happy blend of myth and art with logic and organization. Evocative, poetic, and beautifully written, The Inward Garden gives the reader a process for designing a dream garden. Based on garden archetypes the sea, the cave, the harbor, the promontory, the island, the mountain, and the sky ó the book provides a structure for imagining the garden of one's desires and a practical process for designing this personal garden. Messervy describes in detail each of these archetypal gardens, and each archetype, along with subsequent designs, is magnificently illustrated with lush garden photographs by acclaimed National Geographic photographer Sam Abell. The text and illustrations take the reader on a step-by-step walk through gardens great and small, analyzing landforms, inspecting soil, studying light, all with the goal of teaching one how to design a garden by following one's own creative impulses.

    In building three cottage gardens from scratch at his home in Barnsdale, Geoff Hamilton set out to simplify the practical problems of creating a natural rustic look.

    She shares her immense knowledge, from soil types and garden-design principles to plant characteristics and growing tips.

    Four chapters trace the garden through the different seasons of the year, paying special attention to the atmosphere and light that so preoccupied Monet and became the focus of his life as a painter. Throughout, the work done by Giverny's present-day gardeners is analysed to reveal the practical techniques of maintaining the most-visited garden in the world.

    Full color photographs.

     The garden Rosemary Verey has made at Barnsley House, Gloucestershire, is one of England's finest and most famous not grand or forbidding, but approachable and well loved. It has an overall unity and firm structure, but each individual area - from pool to potager, knot garden to wilderness - is easily understood on a small scale. Whether you want to create an all-seasons garden, grow herbs, make a decorative vegetable garden, plant for beautiful color effect, understand underplanting, choose the best bulbs, or place focal points such as statues and fountains with subtlety or impact, you will find these and any number of gardening skills sympathetically explained here. In this unique book, Rosemary Verey explains her principles of gardening and describes all her practical experience in the most accessible way - by taking readers on a personal tour of the garden. The culmination of thirty-five years experience, her account of the learning process includes not only the successes and realization of dreams, but also the changes of heart and the garden evolved. Seen through its creator's eyes, the garden yields pearls of wisdom for everyone, from beginners to the most experienced of gardeners. Gardening expert Rosemary Verey explains her gardening principles and guidelines in a practical and accessible manner, making it possible for all gardeners to create their own masterpiece garden.

    Acclaimed landscape designers Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd offer a profusely illustrated month-by-month chronicle of their magnificent southern Vermont garden.

    It is one of the most visited garden in Britain. This book relates the garden's outstanding features to the distinctive styles of Sir Harold and Vita, and examines the design, development, planting and maintenance of each part of the garden throughout the year. There are detailed planting plans of the beds and borders, and an analysis of the precise use of colors that make this garden one of the most copied in the world. A descriptive catalogue lists the plants raised at Sissinghurst and named after the garden or its creators.

    This is an extraordinary reference and practical, hands-on manual. The authoritative plant directory is arranged alphabetically and comprises more than 4000 plants from more than 400 genera.