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Pacific Northwest
Regional Books
Books based on gardening, gardeners or gardens in our Pacific Northwest region. If you can't find the book you want click through on Amazon.com link in index to left or at the bottom of this page.
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The Abundant Garden : A Celebration of Color, Texture, and Blooms
Book Description: An "abundant garden" is one that is effusive, emotional, demonstrative, and unrestrained. ABUNDANT GARDEN identifies nine design aspects of an abundant garden-and shows how each one is used in a specific garden. Each garden is located on Bainbridge Island, Seattle, WA, in the heart of one of America's most highly regarded horticultural "edens." The book takes the reader on a tour with insightful and imaginative photographs and beautifully written text.
Includes brief essays before each garden "journey" that will describe the abundancy concept that the related garden exemplifies.
Includes specific plant recommendations and practical recommendations that will address the needs of gardeners across the country.
Ann Lovejoy's Organic Garden Design School : A Guide for Creating Your Own Beautiful, Easy-Care Garden
Book Description An organic gardener all her life and a garden writer for more than 15 years, Ann Lovejoy began her foray into gardening by growing vegetables and herbs but soon branched out into making ornamental gardens as well. Today, her gardens combine plants of all kinds, edible and beautiful, in carefully arranged communities. Her garden designs and plantings echo the layers found in nature. Ann groups plants with similar needs, according to their roles in their native habitats, and encourages cooperative relationships between people and plants.
In these pages, you'll celebrate the beauty of Ann's gardens and discover how to apply her organic design principles to your garden. You'll learn how to create healthy, self-sufficient gardens that are easy to care for, ecologically sound, and enduringly beautiful. Ann's own gardens contain thousands of plants, yet they require only a few hours a week to maintain. She started her garden school to help gardeners learn how to make satisfying, sustainable gardens like hers. Ann shares a lifetime's worth of gardening experience and teaches you how to transform your site, large or small, into a naturalistic garden filled with healthy plants.
Along with the fundamental design principles that apply to every garden, you'll discover techniques and ideas for moving beyond the basics. You'll learn how to use space wisely, design interior flow patterns, choose regionally appropriate plants, and create an ambiance and mood in your garden that reflects your personal style. Ann also addresses practical questions that emerge as gardeners move past the beginner stage. The hands-on workbook section contains exercises to guide you through the process of designing a garden to suit your needs, helps you evaluate your site to maximize its potential, and offers valuable advice on creating plant combinations.
Ann Lovejoy creates gardens with solid organic principles in mind: Make great soil and your plants will grow well. Create healthy, ecologically sound plant communities, and they will take care of themselves. She is frequently asked how she gardens so successfully. This book is her answer.
Artists in Their Gardens
This is one of my favorites. Even though I have read it cover to cover, I keep picking it up and going through it one more time. Artists in Their Gardens is very inspirational. When I see others creativity such as the work featured in this book, it starts my creative juices flowing.
Book Description: Artists do it differently. Make gardens, that is. This lusciously photographed book showcases ten creative, unconventional, sometimes outrageous gardens made by painters, glassblowers, collage artists, and sculptors. Their uncommon approaches provide fresh ideas and inspiration for all gardeners who are all tired of the same old beds, borders, and lawns.
The Big Book of Northwest Perennials :
Choosing, Growing, Tending
Book Description: Returning with showy brilliance year after year, perennials continue to be the center of gardening interest both nationally and regionally. Master gardener Marty Wingate and photographer Jacqueline Koch present a gorgeous and definitive guide to the best perennials for Northwestern climates, filled with specific advice on how to select the best type and quality, as well as recommendations on which perennials work best together (similar light and water needs). The book features descriptions of 1,260 different plants. Wingate's easy-to-follow instructions on caring for perennials are enhanced by Koch's lovely photos, which fill the book with vibrant color.
Big Ideas for Northwest Small Gardens
For the gardener working in a front garden, parking area, narrow strip, tiny backyard, or condo balcony, this book offers plenty of possibilities. The author, whose weekly gardening column appears in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, shows how to make the smallest garden gorgeous, from extending planting areas with containers and installing compact water features to increasing a garden’s flower power by losing that lawn. 80 color photos are included in this colorful guide.
The Butterflies of Cascadia: A Field Guide to All the Species of Washington, Oregon, and Surrounding Territories
The Butterflies of Cascadia is for those who watch, photograph, study, or garden for butterflies, as well as for everyone who simply enjoys and appreciates their beauty in the Pacific Northwest.
Cass Turnbull's Guide to Pruning: What, When, Where, and How to Prune for a More Beautiful Garden
Book Description The Northwest Pruning Guide provides step-by-step instructions for pruning trees, shrubs, and other plants to help them flourish in any garden or lawn. It profiles the most common types of plants found in Northwest gardens, including evergreen and deciduous shrubs, bamboos and tea roses, camellia, hedge plants, wisteria, and trees. Each entry also covers common gardening mistakes, traditional methods, proper positions, tips on the best times to prune, and more.
Flora of the Pacific Northwest: An Illustrated Manual
This book is meant for those serious about botany. The keys are extensive. It does need updating but still an excellent book used by our universities and botanists.
Fragrance in Bloom: The Scented Garden Throughout the Year
Book Description: Color, leaf, and texture tend to dominate gardeners' criteria when it comes to plant selection. But in the garden, floral scent is often the most powerfully sensual experience. In this book, expert gardener Ann Lovejoy recommends and describes over 300 scented flowers that will provide fragrant beauty throughout the year. And because night-bloomers have some of the most aromatic scents, they get a chapter of their own. Here are profiles of longtime garden favorites such as roses and magnolia, as well as forgotten charmers like night phlox and the intoxicating datura. The descriptions include expert cultivation tips to attain the best results.
A Garden Gallery
The Plants, Art, and Hardscape of Little and Lewis
Book Description: Celebrated internationally as artists and gardeners, George Little and David Lewis open the gates to their renowned garden retreat and share the personalities and enthusiasms that have shaped its wild fantasia of plants, hardscape, and art. Little and Lewis are long-time collaborators whose concrete sculptures and installations have been collected around the world. Their Puget Sound garden is the primary showcase for their artwork but also for the unique gardening qualities that epitomize their style. Water features, oversized and broadleaved plants, expansive use of color, zone-pushing tropicals, architectural emphasis, and elements of classicism and mystery --- all combine to create a deeply personal and magical space. In this long-awaited book, Little and Lewis describe how any gardener can achieve this kind of excitement and space for reflection in his or her backyard. From practical advice on how to make a slow-drip natural fountain, choose complementary colors, or build an inexpensive Tuscan-style wall to conceptual discussions on laying out borders and making use of water, Little and Lewis offer inspiration and encourage gardeners to use imagination and take risks. Stunning and unforgettable photographs by Barbara Denk provide a lush visual interpretation, while NPR's "Doyenne of Dirt," Ketzel Levine, describes the authors' important influence on the gardening community.
See Rainy Side Gardeners' book review.
Gardening in the Northwest
This is a beautiful book that does our Pacific Northwest proud! Many ideas for landscaping your own garden. The beauty of these Northwest gardens would make anyone outside our region envious.
Garden Retreats
This book is a beautiful reminder of how important an outdoor sanctuary can be. Especially in our hectic fast-paced world. The garden reflects a slower, gentler place to be. I have had the privilage to have met Barbara and toured her garden. Her garden is also her retreat.
Home Landscaping: Northwest Region
If you don't have any experience with designing a garden and can't afford to hire a designer this book will help you immensely.
Book Description: Designs covering 23 of the most common situations, such as front entries, foundation plantings, patios and steep slopes.
In Veronica's Garden
Book Description: IN VERONICA'S GARDEN is the remarkable true story of a garden and the larger than life personality of its creator. This is a record of the development of the Milner Gardens and Woodland, a stunningly beautiful garden nestled into the Canadian West Coast Douglas-fir forest.
The Jewel Box Garden
Book Description: Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could describe your garden as a jewel box full of beautiful plant treasures? In this sequel to the bestselling Shocking Beauty, garden impresario Thomas Hobbs shows you how.
The Jewel Box Garden is a luscious, full-colour book that features 160 new and startling photos by renowned garden photographer David McDonald. In 12 chapters with titles such as "Gilding The Lily" and "Thinking Like a Plant," Hobbs explains his philosophy of gardening and life, or as he puts it, "Life As We Dream It Could Be." In his own provocative and highly original way, he encourages gardeners to tap into their creativity and invest their heart and soul in creating oases of beauty --- intimate spaces where they can escape the pressures of modern life.
Landscaping for Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest
Book Description: Whether you are planting a yard from scratch or modifying an existing area, LANDSCAPING FOR WILDLIFE IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST will help you select, arrange, and maintain plants and other landscape elements that fulfill wildlife needs. Homeowners, property owners, professional wildlife managers, landscape architects, and garden designers will all find it invaluable.
Living With Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest
Book Description: Living with Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest is all about coexisting with the animals commonly found in gardens, ponds, attics, crawl spaces, and other places where humans and wildlife cross paths throughout Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.
From bats to woodpeckers, sixty-eight species are described here, with details about feeding and mating habits, family structures, and life cycles. Living with Wildlife explains how to attract animals; how to spot their presence by identifying tracks, droppings, and other signs; and how and where to safely view them.
Focusing on the species that provoke the most calls to wildlife agencies and nonprofit groups, the book provides detailed information on how to prevent and solve conflicts with wildlife.
This book is a valuable reference for homeowners, property owners, and property managers; habitat restoration professionals; the wildlife control industry; and private and nonprofit wildlife groups. It can also be used in horticulture and urban wildlife management courses.
Naturalistic Gardening: Reflecting the Planting Patterns of Nature
Anne Lovejoy
- Amazon.com
"Gardening is by definition interference with nature," begins Ann Lovejoy cheerfully. That said, gardeners will save themselves no end of trouble by cooperating with nature insofar as possible. Thus naturalistic gardening, which has made real inroads into the more formal, traditional American gardens over the past few years. But naturalistic gardening doesn't mean just throwing a lot of seeds on the ground, or letting the weeds take over. Lovejoy's practiced advice helps gardeners get a handle on constructing a garden that is like nature, but with an element of art. Allow plants to follow their own natures by judicious placement, she counsels, and you will minimize their care as well as reveal their essential beauty.
Lovejoy includes enough practical instructions to allow anyone with a reasonable amount of gardening experience to create a successful naturalistic garden, and the inspiring patterns of the example gardens, beautifully photographed by Allan Mandell, are nicely explained. Lovejoy even gives a chapter to the hotly debated tropicalismo school of naturalistic design. The emphasis is very much on gardening in the northwestern United States, but anyone who yearns for a more natural look in the garden will benefit from the principles outlined here.
The Northwest Cottage Garden
S. Andrew Schulman
- Book Description Especially suited to the growing conditions and the urban settings of the Pacific Northwest, cottage gardens are comfortable and romantic and look as though they were thrown together with ease. However, these beautiful gardens need considerable planning to appear natural and informal. This accessible guide explores the origin and history of cottage gardens, and outlines the essentials of creating a cozy garden sanctuary, including design and layout, functional structures, furniture, decor and materials, plant selection, and maintenance.
Northwest Garden Style: Ideas, Designs, and Methods for the Creative Gardener
Jan Kowalczewsk
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Jan does a wonderful job of doing an intimate portrait of each of these gardens. Each style featured gives great ideas for our Northwest gardens.
Book Description Twenty-two private Northwest gardens provide the backdrop for inspiring solutions to the most common gardening problems in this full-color extravaganza from garden paradise-the Northwest.
Northwest Landscaping: A Practical Guide to Creating the Garden You've Always Wanted
Michael Munro
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Book Description An invaluable source book for creating outdoor living spaces that incorporate natural materials and are low maintenance.
Perennials for Washington and Oregon
Alison Beck and Marianne Binetti
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For novice Northwest gardeners who are wanting to grow perennials this book is a good one to successfully get your feet wet growing perennials in our maritime climate west of the Cascades.
Book Description
Gardening can be easy, successful and enjoyable with this gardening guide at your fingertips. Featuring 100 of the Northwest's favorite perennials, this book includes planting tips, blooming periods and information on choosing plants for specific sites. Beautifully illustrated with full color photographs, this guide also includes a plant information chart with a wealth of valuable information at your fingertips. Co-author Marianne Binetti is a well-known gardening personality who lives and works near Seattle. She has written several books and hosts her own TV show.
Plant Life: Growing a Garden in the Pacific Northwest
Valerie Easton
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Book Description: You won’t find potted petunias or rigid rows of hot-pink impatiens in this gorgeous new book. Instead, Plant Life features 80 luscious photographs of author Valerie Easton’s own garden (also seen in Better Homes and Gardens magazine). Drawn from her popular column of the same name in the Seattle Times Pacific Northwest magazine, Plant Life invites the world into Easton’s garden, offering readers a personal perspective from a master gardener. Organized around the twelve months, Plant Life covers a wide array of topics including climbing plants, leaves that aren’t green, containers, garden paths, pests, and much more. Each chapter contains several essays -- some instructive, others philosophical -- relevant to that time of year, and features a “Now in Bloom” section focusing on plants at their prime and illustrated with full-color photographs.
The Plant Locator: Western Region
Susan Hill
- Book Description Lists more than 50,000 plants and the nurseries that carry them. An additional 10,000 plant names are added for reference.
Includes listings for 336 nurseries in: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and British Columbia.
A common name/botanical name index with nearly 9000 entries helps sort out confusion with plant names. Plant names are checked for accuracy.
Plants of Western Oregon, Washington & British Columbia
Book Description: A great resource for botanists, native plant enthusiasts, ecologists, conservationists, and amateur naturalists who desire a comprehensive, up-to-date, and well-illustrated book for the identification of plants of the Pacific Northwest. This is the definitive guide to the rich and varied plant life of the region, from the ocean shore to the crest of the Cascades, from British Columbia south through the Klamath Mountains of southwestern Oregon and the Siskiyous in northwestern California. Its botanical coverage is complete, including plants native to the region as well as those that have been introduced and become naturalized. More than 2500 species are fully described, with user-friendly keys and more than 700 color photographs and 350 line drawings to facilitate successful identification.
Roses for the Pacific Northwest
Christine Allen
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After reading the review I believe this a must for the beginning rose gardener and perhaps a good reference for those who know roses. Either way it is on my list for my own book shelf....She teaches courses on rose care and cultivation at Van Dusen Garden in Vancouver, where she also works as a volunteer. Christine lives on a farm in Langley, British Columbia, and grows over 200 roses, among herbs and perennials in her large country garden. Chapters include: Choosing a Rose; Suitable Roses for our climate; Preparing and designing the site; Amending your soil; Care and cultivation; Year round maintenance; Pruning; All-important pest control."
Shocking Beauty: Thomas Hobbs' Innovative Garden Vision
Thomas Hobbs
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This is on my must have list as I have heard rave reviews about it.
Book description: "Portable Drama," "Staging Incidents," "Zonal Denial" - all these and more concepts presented by iconoclastic and trend-setting garden visionary Thomas Hobbs in this challenging, cutting-edge book on innovative garden design. Using examples from exceptional gardens throughout North America and Europe, Hobbs shows how freeing up the mind from the bonds of conventional garden design concepts can result in gardens of singular allure. Hobbs attests that we can learn from Nature how best to blend color, texture, and species of plants to create beauty in the garden. Luxuriantly illustrated with over 190 striking four-color photographs, this thought-provoking book is a fount of ideas you can use to invigorate your garden's visual appeal.
Strange Sites: Uncommon Homes & Gardens of the Pacific Northwest
Jim Christy
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If you like quirky landscapes full of quirky details you will enjoy this book!
Sunset Western Garden Annual 2004
Sunset Publishers
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This book is like getting Sunset Magazine with no ads and all gardening articles and nothing more! Month by month regional what to do in your garden tips are included. Who needs to buy another Sunset magazine to wade through everything to get to the gardening articles?
A small article on Rainy Side Gardeners Plant Swap can be found in this book along with many other wonderful gardens and their gardeners. So what are you waiting for? Your momma says get this book!
Trees of Greater Portland
Phyllis C. Reynolds
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This book is a tour of Portland neighborhoods and its trees. Inside the cover is 132 trees selected for their exceptional beauty, rarity, size, history, or other notable features. A book well worth reaching for on your bookshelf.
Western Garden Book
Sunset Publishers
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Every new gardener in the Pacific Northwest needs this book. If you could only afford one reference book this is the one to get.
Western Landscaping Book
Sunset Publishers
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Some wonderful ideas for your western landscape, from fences to pools. So many ideas so little time!
From Ingram The natural companion to Sunset's acclaimed Western Garden Book, this much-needed volume is organized by region, featuring descriptions of native and naturally adapted plants throughout. Beautifully rendered illustrations highlight entry gardens, innovative borders, and artistic structural accents. 350 color photos. 300 landscape plans.
Winter Ornamentals: For the Maritime Northwest Gardener
Dan Hinkley
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This little book is packed with many plants that will add color to the drab winter landscape. If you wish to have a beautiful garden year round this book is a must, even if just for the plant lists alone.
A Year Along the Garden Path: Beyond the Basics - Gardening for All Seasons
Anne Lovejoy
- Book Description Specifically written for the intermediate gardener, this book, organized by month, caters to the many gardeners who have learned basic gardening skills and want to move on to more sophisticated plant selection, design, and garden elements. Ann Lovejoy’s expert yet down-to-earth approach offers easy solutions to a wide range of gardening obstacles. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The Year in Bloom: Gardening for All Seasons in the Pacific Northwest
Ann Lovejoy
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This was given to me as a gift quite a few years ago and it still is a long time favorite I take down and read from time to time.
Book Description: Gardeners from northern California to British Columbia will find plenty to cheer about in The Year in Bloom, a celebration of one of the most ideal gardening climates on earth. This classic volume from Ann Lovejoy, the Pacific Northwest's favorite garden writer, offers year-round inspiration and instruction for gardeners of all abilities in the Pacific Northwest.
More regional books:
Native Plants -- Rainy Side Books
Weeds -- Rainy Side Books
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