Plant Partners - Softcover

Anna Pavord

3.83

18 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405305789 ISBN 13: 9781405305785

Publisher: Dorling Kindersley Plc P/B, 2004

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Fire your imagination with this fantastic guide to creative plant combinations. Anna Pavord's perfect planting suggestions help solve the perennial problem of what to plant with what for best effect. Includes beautiful photographs and tips on which perennials and annuals no garden should be without.

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Review:

Anna Pavord has no patience for dwarf plants ("a perverse trend"), pastels ("Stop overdosing on pastels. We've had more than enough of them"), or winter gardens ("Who needs them? The pleasures of the winter garden are only for masochists"), not to mention all-white beds ("somnambulist gardening"). She has a sharp eye and a predilection for cheeky Briticisms, and she's not afraid to use either. Plant Partners is organized into seasons--the real growing seasons: signs of spring, spring turns to summer, high summer, and into autumn. Within these seasons Pavord presents 60 "star" plants that should be highlighted in the perennial bed. For each of her favorite plants she provides a supporting cast of two varieties--annuals, bulbs, or perennials--that partner particularly well with the stars, and under the same soil and light conditions. The groupings might be designed so that all of the flowers will be in bloom at once (pasqueflower with grape hyacinth and deep-purple primroses, for example), or so that when one flower's blooms are just starting to fade another's are waiting in the wings (lily-of-the-valley with a hellebore and barrenwort). A listing of "alternative" partners extends the range of choices to include more unusual plants and ones that might be more challenging to grow. Foliage is given as much consideration as blooms:

"Darling! Salmon! How brave!" exclaim the white-garden brigade as they sharpen their pruning knives for a horticultural mercy killing. You might as well fall on your garden fork there and then as try to explain that the point of the rodgersia they are looking at is not the buff-pink flower but the whirls of bronze underneath it.

But her exhortation to use foliage--as well as grasses and nonflowering perennials as "star" plants--to best advantage cannot be ignored in Plant Partners. Pavord's advice throughout is practical and opinionated. --Liana Fredley

About the Author:

Anna Pavord is a well known author and a contributing gardening writer to Country Life, Country Living, Elle Decoration, The Independent and The Observer. She is also an associate editor and regular writer for Gardens Illustrated and a sought-after speaker on the gardening lecture circuit in the UK and US. Her previous DK gardening titles include The Border Book, New Kitchen Garden and the highly acclaimed bestseller The Tulip. Anna lives in West Dorset.

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