This is an awsome book to have if you like to decorate your yard with living things! Bushes,flowers,plants- you name it and it can be turned into a beautiful border. I have this in the large paperback version and let me just say...my yard sparkles with life. It is a wonderful and easy to understand guide to creating stunning borders around your home and yard. I bought one for my mother-in-law and she loves it. Can't go wrong with this item!!

This extremely well-conceived book gives planting plans for a variety of border situations (shady, sunny & stony, poolside, a very narrow space, etc.). It features drawings of each border in two different seasons, showing how the look will change as different plants come into bloom, photographs of each plant, and suggestions for varying each border by substituting plants which will give a different color scheme or look. A lot of information is packed into a concise format full of interesting planting ideas, making this an exceptionally useful and readable book.

The pictures and information in this book are gorgeous & informative. The only issue I had was that though vegetable gardens are meant to be useful & practical, in many instances the attractive aspects of her gardens neccessitated the plants going to seed, therefore becoming inedible. The gardens were also often quite larger than the average person might want to manage; but I enjoyed dreaming about having the energy & space to implement her designs.

This is my favorite gardening book. I put in a vegetable garden this year and THIS book was the basis of my handiwork. Beauty and bountiful harvests are the result of hard work. This book was an inspiration for me.

I could not finish this book, and I thought it would be right up my alley. It was a sort of a mix of anecdotes and history. Personally I could have done without the anecdotes.

Ms.Pavord certainly does love her tulips - the narrative is strewn with latin names for every variety of tulip.
Originally from the middle-east and very different to most other flowers, the discovery of strange multi-coloured hybrids that appeared spontaneously kept nurserymen occupied for years looking for the perfect specimen. This led to an outrageous inflation in the price, people selling their homes to buy one bulb!

Written in a style that fails to hold one's attention, there is perhaps a tad more botanical detail than is necessary for the layman, but when one considers that this is the second book - a corollary to a scholarly exercise - on tulips, it is surprising that so little jargon is used.
Very informative though lacking in story-telling. ***.

This book, generally touted as 'the definitive book' on tulips, is somewhat disappointing. More interesting historical information exists on tulipomania and tulip fever. Particularly irksome is the prevalence of passages in French with no English translations. Come on, Ms Pavord, we aren't all academics schooled in French! I thought information on the discovery of the virus that causes tulips to 'break' should have been included: so much has been written already about tulip fever through the 16th and 17th centuries that to continue the history to the 1920s, when the cause of breaking tulips was discovered, would have rounded out the picture nicely. But we only receive a vague reference here and there. Considering also that the latter part of the book concerns species and hybrid tulips, more photographs would have been helpful. One description sounds much like another after a while.