This book is an excellent reference source in understanding the processes on breeding the top favorite ornamental plants. The book is well written to support the serious amateur plant breeder to even the professional. The introductory chapters provide a quick education on genetics and its applications to plant protection and trademarks. The book is well illustrated and provides and excellent source of collections, suppliers, plant societies and references for each ornamental plant. Well worth the purchase!

This book has been sorely needed: a book about breeding ornamental (as opposed to crop) plants, and geared toward the serious amateur plant breeder. However, even professional plant breeders should find much of interest in this book.

There are introductory chapters on general breeding and basic genetics, clearly written and none of it heavily technical. This will be especially useful to the beginning breeder. The rest of the chapters are written by different plant breeders, discussing different genera or groups of plants. Although this makes the quality somewhat uneven and some of the information redundant, it's both fascinating and instructive to see how the goals, objectives, and techniques are similar, as well as different, between the different plant groups and different breeders. By and large, these breeders are not professionals, they are just regular people who like to grow plants and have gotten bitten by the hybridizing bug. All have valuable information to pass on based on their own experience, so even if you buy this book for information about breeding Saintpaulia, or Hemerocallis, or another particular group, be sure to read ALL the chapters as much of the information is applicable to plant breeding in general.

The book is handsomely produced and very nicely illustrated, with excellent color photographs of the plants and line drawings to help illustrate certain techniques. This book is required reading for anybody who is interested in plant breeding as a hobby.