Choosing Plant Combinations: 501 beautiful ways to mix and match color and shape in the garden (Better Homes & Gardens) - Hardcover

Better Homes And Gardens Books

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0696210142 ISBN 13: 9780696210143

Publisher: Better Homes and Gardens, 1999

This book does the homework for anyone who wants to create a beautiful garden but lacks the time to plan and design. It helps readers achieve maximum effect with minimum effort, with examples of combinations in the book for a bold or subdued look.

Gorgeous, full-color photographs of different plant combinations based on color and form.

Plant combinations shown give optimum effect using the aesthetics of color and form—including single color, bold color, subtle color, similar form, subtle form, and bold form.

Suggests alternative plants that give the same look and add to the regional diversity of the plant material included.

Combinations are adaptable to all regions of America.

Includes complete cultural information and mail-order sources for every plant shown.

Review:

For those gardeners intimidated by the thought of planning color symphonies, creating color echoes, or applying any color theory to the garden as a whole, Choosing Plant Combinations will come as a welcome relief. Granted, color is the single most important effect gardeners work with--nothing is more important to the first impression a garden gives and the emotional response it evokes. However, color can be a challenge to work with, as it depends greatly on surrounding colors, quality of light, and individual perception.

The author, Cathy Wilkinson Barash, describes her book as "a non-designer's garden design book." Her idea, and it is a good one, is that pleasing gardens are built combination by combination. You don't need an overall scheme, but rather dozens of workable combos of two or three plants that, seen as a whole, make up a garden. All plants are clearly identified in 250 full-color photographs that illustrate ideas for effective combinations. Barash also explores the role colored and variegated foliages, architecturally shaped plants, and ornamental grasses play in creating pleasing, long-lasting combinations.

While the book's design (graphically lively to the point of excess) itself is questionable, the photographs are nevertheless lovely and may inspire gardeners to experiment, loosen up, and help them to worry less about using color. Nothing can set a mood or enliven a garden more than the bold use of color and form, and Barash's new book provides plenty of ideas to encourage gardeners to do just that, one plant combination at a time. --Valerie Easton

From Booklist:

This book on garden design shows how color, shape, and texture work in all sorts of plant groupings. Barash divides the combinations into two main sections--color and form--and each section is further divided into single, subtle, and bold. In the color section, the distinctions are obvious. The form section examines the overall plants as well as the leaves and flowers for shape, growth habit, size, and texture. There are 250 color photographs of gardens showing a vast variety of plant combinations. The combinations include annuals, perennials, bulbs, trees, and shrubs. The book's index lists each plant's common and botanical names, type (annual, perennial, etc.), height, time of bloom, flower color, light requirement, and hardiness zones. This Better Homes and Gardens book is slated for a national media campaign. George Cohen