This book is a great book for planning your landscape garden (even if it's already well established). We bought the hardback version when we lived in England, when it was first published.

As a rule, the English prefer a garden that looks as though it has been there for years, and Nigel tells how to achieve that very quickly, giving it that established, comfortable, lush feel, as opposed to the stark bareness of most new landscape designs. But beyond just the first year or two, he tells how to plan succession plantings so your garden develops and matures through the years.

The photos and drawings provide LOTS of inspiration, food for thought, concepts that you can 'steal' for your plot. They are classically English but adaptable almost anywhere. Most of them are designed for the average householder, not the grand formal gardens that require acres of land. If you can't visit England, photos are the next best thing. Maybe I'm predjudiced after living there, but the English do know how to garden, and this book shares a lot of their knowledge.

In this book, Mr. Colborn has certainly given me my money's worth. I am fond of the fact that he has backed up his text with beautifully done photos, and many of them too! It is wonderfully inspiring and I have taken some of his ideas and implemented them into my garden and they look great!

My bookshelves are full of gardening books with lots of beautiful photographs but little usable information - unless of course you can take 3 months off your job as a finishing carpenter, or your landscaping efforts consist of hitting the speed-dial button for your favorite Master Gardener. Otherwise, you might as well be satisfied for your landscaping to look like everyone else's. "The Garden Floor", though, offers refreshing design ideas for formal, Japanese, cottage-y, contemporary & woodsy gardens, involving a range of materials from your basic grass & concrete to scree, recycled materials, many kinds of stone & wood, brickwork, plant materials, even glass beads. For the not-so-design-oriented reader, the author covers designing your garden to look appropriate to the style of your home. The suitability and maintenance required for a vast array of materials is covered frankly, including the best information I have found in my search for lawn replacement plants. As the title says, the focus of the book is at ground level, but both the photos and the text give enough information & advice on adjacent plant materials (and alternatives) that the less experienced gardener won't feel unprepared to recreate the look in their own backyard. Instructions for the DIYer are thorough & include sketches, but thankfully don't take over the book. The end product: a book for the novice or advanced gardener, that is beautiful enough to buy for the photos and thorough enough to convince my husband I bought him a DIY book to save money!