Dream Plants for the Natural Garden [Hardcover]

Gardeners are moving away from tidy borders and neat velvet lawns to more expressive areas of plants grown within a natural movement of design. Who better to explain how to do this than the Dutch international garden designers, Henk Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf. Dream Plants for the Natural Garden suggests 1,200 plant species which they consider practical for the average garden. Each is give its Latin and common name with a brief description and notes of favourable conditions and flowering period.

The book covers perennials, bulbs, grasses, ferns and small shrubs, all of which the authors believe will continue growing, flowering and seeding for many years There are three main sections covering tough (perennials, grasses, ferns, bulbs and shrubs), playful (self-seeding perennials, biennials and annuals) and troublesome plants (invasive, capricious and demanding), explaining how to deal with them. Piet Oudolf has nurseries near Arnheim where he is practised in choosing plants that are easy to maintain and mainly disease resistant. Both he and Henk Gerritsen took many of the photographs that illustrate the text.

Dream Plants for the Natural Garden is an ideal reference book. Use some of the ideas to enliven your own garden or create an imaginative new one. --Judy Wyles --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Gerritsen and Oudolf loosely define a "natural garden" as one that contains plants that need minimal maintenance, attract wildlife, and have a "natural appearance." More than 1000 such plants are covered in this encyclopedic guide. Because the authors are garden designers practicing in Northern Europe, the plants featured are mostly suitable to cold-winter, temperate climates with summer rainfall. For other regions, many of the plants covered are unsuitable horticulturally (requiring lots of care) and environmentally (extremely invasive and ecologically destructive). Moreover, the authors support the cautious use of invasive plants, so long as gardeners are vigilantly prepared to control their growth. This advice is clearly unsound, especially considering that plants with invasive characteristics can be serious threats to local habitats. For readers interested in natural gardening, a much more regionally and environmentally appropriate resource is Natural Gardening, edited by John Kadel Boring (Time-Life, 1999). This book is not recommended. Brian Lym, City Coll. of San Francisco Lib.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Inquisitive gardeners will savor the engagingly wry tone and provocative opinions contained in this fine compendium. Based upon the long-bandied-about idea of low-maintenance gardening, Gerritsen and Oudolf bring their own distinctive, aesthetic approach to the concept of choosing undemanding plants that also stand as beautiful garden specimens. Inspiring plantsmen, they remind gardeners that perfection is unattainable, so rather than "tarmac your garden," the wise soul learns to work with nature. Tough, playful, and troublesome are attributes that define this richly illustrated book's broad categories of hardy perennials, exuberant self-seeding species, and capricious types that might still be worthy of one's efforts. Taken together, a range of recommended plants holds the promise of bringing an exhilarating naturalism to a garden scheme. Alice Joyce
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"A terrific guide to plants with a Shakerish self-relience." -- Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times Book Review, December 3, 2000

"Dutch garden designers Gerritson and Oudolf share their personal technique for creating beautiful, distinctive gardens that span the seasons." -- FTD in Bloom, Holiday 2000

"More than 200 color photographs and many illustrations make a beautiful case for that flowing naturalistic garden that lies somewhere in your dreams." -- Marianne Binetti, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 23, 2000

"[The authors']book offers each of us the opportunity to create the garden of our dreams." -- Bookseller

A beautiful gift for a gardening friend or for yourself. -- GardenGlories, Summer 2001

A gorgeous compendium of 1200 reliable plants. -- Helen Chesnut, Times Colonist Review, December 16, 2000

Beautifully and lavishly [presents] the aesthetic, indeed often dreamy qualities of plants -- Rudolf Schmid, Taxon, November 2000

Gerritsen and Oudolf have developed the concept of natural gardening to new heights. -- Joanne S. Carpender, www.gardenclub.org, December 17, 2000

Offers each of us the opportunity to create the garden of our dreams. -- Bookseller, October 2000

Timber Press has previously published two critically acclaimed and bestselling books by Piet Oudolf, the influential Dutch landscape designer: Gardening with Grasses (with Michael King) and Designing with Plants (with Noël Kingsbury). This new collaboration with fellow Dutch plantsman Henk Gerritsen deals with a selection of some 1200 plants most suitable for Oudolf's New Wave naturalism, which emphasizes the importance of plant structures in providing all-season interest. The gardener can prune back plants after flowering to create a perpetual spring — at least until the onset of winter — but the authors prefer to follow nature's example and let plants finish flowering, not only to please the birds and butterflies, but for the beauty that well-chosen plant groupings offer as they reach the end of their life cycle. Many illustrations in this book demonstrate the striking effects of Oudolf's favorite plants in fall and winter.

Timber Press has earlier published two critically acclaimed and bestselling books by Piet , the influential Dutch landscape designer: Gardening with Grasses (with Michael King) and Designing with Plants (with Noël Kingsbury). This new collaboration with fellow Dutch plantsman Henk Gerritsen deals with a selection of some 1200 plants most suitable for Oudolf's New Wave naturalism, which emphasizes the importance of plant structures in providing all-season interest.

Henk Gerritsen was born in Utrecht in the Netherlands. He studied politics and history at the University of Amsterdam then trained at the Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam. He made his living as a painter for many years — until 1977 when he met the grand old lady of Dutch garden architecture, Mien Ruys. At that moment he realized that becoming a garden architect would be the best way to combine his great passion in life, plants, with his other talents. In 1978 he started Priona Gardens with his friend Anton Schlepers on Anton's family farm at Schuinesloot in the east of Holland. Henk's extensive knowledge of plants and his artist's eye have resulted in a most remarkable garden, where wild plants from all over the world grow together in low maintenance plant communities that appear natural but are set in an unusual and sometimes absurd architecture. Magazines including Gardens Illustrated, The Garden, House and Garden and World of Interiors have featured Priona Gardens. Henk respects the full cycle of life in his garden; rather than battling disease and decay, "troublesome" weeds, and animals like greenflies, slugs, moles, and rabbits, he prefers to compromise, considering them an essential part of the beauty of the garden. He never uses chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Henk's international projects include creating a wild flower garden from the formal Waltham Place garden at White Waltham (near Maidenhead) in England, and incorporating a natural garden in and around the French hamlet of Leyvinie, close to Perpezac-le-Blanc in the Correze. Though he is a celebrated writer in the Netherlands with several books and monthly magazine columns to his name, Dream Plants for the Natural Garden is his first book that has been translated into English.

Winter is perhaps the best time of year for the gardener: the peace! You don't have to do anything, you don't have to think about anything and you don't have to worry about anything. You can just sit next to the fire reading gardening books and dreaming about how wonderful the garden will be next summer. Naturally, you will have to ensure that the garden has been prepared for winter: that is to say readied for winter without having cut back one plant or raked one leaf. Silhouettes of Eupatorium, Aster umbellatus, Veronicastrum virginicum and the beautiful black spherical seed heads left by the monardas which even in the depths of winter smell like Earl Grey tea. Grasses, of course, especially Miscanthus with its amazing silver plumes, and a lot of Calamagrostis x acutiflora 'Karl Foerster' against the backdrop of a neatly clipped hedge or just against the chill winter wind: it is always sad when you have to cut it back again in spring. And in front, close to the house so you can see them from your armchair, the strong, fleshy shoots of hellebores, working their way through the fallen leaves and remains of last summer's border intones of apple green, darkest purple, white and pale pink, exactly as you would see them in nature, in the Balkans. And, naturally, a specimen of Viburnum x bodnantense 'Dawn' next to the door so you can experience the delicious scent of its flowers every time you go in and out. A garden lovely enough to lift the spirits even on the most sombre and overcast days of winter. And when it has frozen and frost lies everywhere, or when it has snowed, it is so beautiful that you can sit, next to your cat, and stare outside for hours with your nose pressed against the window pane admiring the ghostly forms.