Double Review: The Flower-Powered Garden and The Less Is More Garden

The Flower-Powered Garden: Supercharge Your Borders and Containers with Bold, Colourful Plant Combinations by Andy Vernon
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

I received an Advanced Reader Copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 Stars

This is a fabulous book for gardeners looking to develop color themes in their garden. With an impressive selection of seasonal (early, late) perennial blooms supplemented by some annuals, this book is dense with instructions, suggestions, and ideas. After a generous number of color scheme suggestions, Vernon offers what he terms a florapedia organized by color, to further assist the gardener in planning.

What is lacking in this book is a sense of planning for scale. The florapedia has no information about the height of the various flowers, only colors and sun/shade requirements. Unless you know that pansies are groundcover height and hollyhocks can be five to six feet tall, you are not going to have the best sense of what should go where, especially if you are planting seedlings. Aside from that fault, this is a fabulous book for inspiring a floral garden.

For a sense of how important scale is to planning an elegant yard space, look no further than Susan Morrison's The Less is More Garden.

The Less Is More Garden: Big Ideas for Designing Your Small Yard by Susan Morrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received an Advance Reader Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The goal of this book is to help the homeowner design beautiful gardens for smaller spaces. Whether you're in a townhome or a freestanding home with a small yard, Morrison offers ideas for how to develop rich-looking, inviting garden spaces. The idea of carefully assessing the scale of what you can do in your space, by selecting plants, accessories/features, and especially furniture that fit the space but doesn't make the user feel, as Morrison puts it, like an adult squeezing into elementary school furniture. Morrison skillfully addresses the error of thinking that one large patio surrounded by a bit of lawn will feel larger than a number of smaller well-designed nooks or regions in your yard. She also examines planning for your year-round climate and its importance with regard to actual outdoor use. Climate should be what determines the features you elect to use in your garden. For example, do you really need a firepit in South Florida? The same space might be better served with a quiet water feature, like an urn fountain.

There's much to be learned from Morrison's suggestions. This is a useful book that helps the gardener understand the vital importance of scale in design.


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