The Impatient Gardener - Hardcover

Search, Gay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1903845483 ISBN 13: 9781903845486

Publisher: Quadrille Publishing, 2002

In an age of instant gratification, convenience living and superficial makeovers, people don't have time to garden - let alone wait while their garden matures. This book understand all this and so offers numerous solutions to satisfy our desire for an instant transformation. Choose from the fastest growing plants or the flowers with the most colour and impact, create an instant potted jungle on your balcony, transform your drab yard with modern containers and vivid paint effects, build a romantic rustic arbour, liven up tired concrete slabs with colourful stencilling, divide your lawn with an exotic bamboo screen - these are just a few of the the book's ideas that should quickly and easily help transform an uninspiring, new or neglected garden.

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About the Author:

Gay Search is one of Britain's best-known television gardeners. Over the last ten years she has been responsible for devising and presenting the ground-breaking BBC 2 series Front Gardens, which has been seen in countries such as Canada, Holland, New Zealand, as well as being frequently repeated on both terrestrial and cable stations. She worked with the late Geoff Hamilton on three TV series, and since 1995 has been a regular presenter on the BBC's flagship gardening programme Gardeners' World. She has written many best-selling gardening books and is currently gardening editor of Sainsbury's Magazine. Author location: Barnes, London

Review:

Life has speeded up so much that when people do have a chance to sit down and relax they want to do so in attractive surroundings, be it in the home or outside in the garden. However, as the recent success of the TV makeover shows demonstrate, they do not want to sit around forever waiting for things to grow and mature. They want it now. TV presenter Gay Search's timely book sets out the pointers for impatient gardeners, ensuring the right choices are made for the right spots. From which garden style through hard landscaping and ultimately planting, she takes the reader on a whirlwind yet concise tour of the dos and don'ts of instant gardening. Interspersed in each chapter are recipes for instant gratification, projects that can be achieved in a matter of hours to quell any impatience. She covers both traditional and contemporary designs together with a mix of the two - hard to achieve but in her capable hands made easy. And she focuses on ornamentation as well as furnishing, ensuring the right furniture is chosen to complement the scheme. Three comprehensive plant lists are broken down into fast, medium and slow growing plants which, with careful study, will give a planting that at once has instant colour and form whilst also providing more slow-growing mature growth in the background. A useful warning is also given of the seven ungovernable fast plants to avoid. Container planting is not overlooked and is indeed encouraged for people constantly on the move, enabling them to have an instant garden wherever and however often they move. Easy to read, informative and to the point, this is an ideal eye-opener to a new impatient gardener. Who knows, it may even open up a whole new world they didn't know existed before.

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