Powerhouse Plants: 510 Top Performers for Multi-Season Beauty - Softcover

Rice, Graham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1604692103 ISBN 13: 9781604692105

Publisher: Timber Pr, 2013

Synopsis

Gardeners, like everyone, are too short on time and money to waste either on plants that only look good for a few weeks. You want hardworking, eye-catching plants that provide beauty for multiple seasons. You want powerhouse plants&;plants with colorful spring flowers and summer fruits, or summer fruits and fall foliage, or summer flowers, fall foliage and winter stems...or any combination of two or more of these desirable features. Like flowering dogwood that boasts summer flowers and fall fruit and foliage. Or honeysuckle that has fragrant spring flowers, summer and fall foliage, and fall fruit.

Powerhouse Plants by Graham Rice features multiseasonal perennials, annuals, groundcovers, vines, shrubs, and trees in profiles that include basic plant information, size, hardiness, and preferred growing conditions.

About this title

About the Authors

Graham Rice is a award-winning international garden writer. Rice has written for the top gardening magazines including Horticulture, Garden Design, BBC Gardeners' World, Gardens Illustrated, and Country Life. Trained at the prestigious Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, he is editor-in-chief of the American Horticultural Society's Encyclopedia of Perennials, and he runs the Royal Horticultural Society's New Plants blog as well as his own blog at transatlanticgardener.com

judywhite is author and photographer of the award-winning Taylor's Guide to Orchids (Houghton Mifflin 1996). A past trustee of the American Orchid Society (AOS), she has earned its highest prize for writing about orchid culture, as well as the AOS Silver Medal for outstanding service to the orchid community. Her photography has graced many books and publications, and has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution. A former research biologist and past editor-in-chief of one of the world's first mega-gardening Web sites, Time Life's Virtual Garden, judywhite is married to British garden writer Graham Rice. She is proud to say she has killed orchids on both sides of the Atlantic. Visit her Web site at www.gardenphotos.com.

From the Back Cover

We homeowners want to spend our hard-earned money on plants that look good for more than a few weeks&;or only a few days&;of the year. Even favorite plants can lose their charm if they look the same in every season. The best value comes from hardworking plants that truly earn their keep&;with eye-catching looks that transform themselves over two, three, or even four seasons, giving you multiple plants in one. Of course, these treasures also should be easy, hardy, and glorious performers.

A &;powerhouse plant&; is one that changes beautifully and dramatically over the seasons, with colorful spring flowers, summer fruits, and fall foliage. . . or with summer flowers, fall foliage, and winter stem color&;or some other combination of wonderful features and completely different looks. This book profiles outstanding multi-season plants from Abelia to Weigela, including perennials, annuals, groundcovers, vines, shrubs, and trees. By combining them in your yard, you can have a landscape that never looks boring or tired.

Powerhouse Plants is the indispensable guide to making sure you get the most out of your landscape&;and leave the &;slacker&; plants at the nursery.
 

Reviews

Money’s tight. Who can afford to buy a plant that does only one thing? Sure, a shrub may have gorgeous spring flowers, but if it fades into the background the rest of the year, it’s not pulling its full garden weight. Rice catalogs more than 500 overachieving plants that bring multitasking glory to gardens both large and small. From the tactile magnetism of the exfoliating bark sported by the aptly named paperbark maple to the eye-catching allure of a red-twig dogwood’s crimson twigs, plants with multiple-appeal factors of fall color, winter interest, spring blossoms, and summer fragrance make economical and horticultural sense. Answering his own gardening mantra, What else does it do?, Rice’s encyclopedic compendium of high-performing annuals, bulbs, shrubs, deciduous trees, perennials, grasses, and conifers highlights his personal favorite cultivars and lists suitable alternatives. Concise care and habit information is augmented by captivating color photographs by Judy White that showcase these hardworking, must-have garden standouts. --Carol Haggas

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
Most gardeners hoping to create attractive gardens think first of flowers. But plants have so many other appealing features, beauties that add color and shape and texture, bringing life to our lives and our gardens. Every aspect of a plant, from its emerging spring shoots to its lofty maturity, has the potential to inspire interest and admiration—or just to bring us pure color.
    
But why stop at plants that do just one thing, have just one appeal? Why not choose powerhouse plants that have more than one season of interest? These are plants that offer two or more entirely different features so that, at different times of the year, different displays are produced at the same place in the garden—from just one plant.
    
Such multi-talented plants are especially valuable in small yards where every inch is precious. What better way to make the most of a limited space than to create different displays at various times—in different seasons, or perhaps just a few weeks apart—from just one plant? In larger spaces, plants with more than one season of interest bring an enhanced richness, a new diversity, an intensity missing in normal plantings. Walking through your garden to admire your plants will take at least twice as long! Finally, plants that shine at more than one season allow different plant combinations to be created with neighboring plants at different times. Another stretch for your imagination, true, but so rewarding.
    
And never think that plants with multi-season appeal are rare or obscure or are only discovered by a diligent search of the country’s specialist nurseries. Many will be found in your local nursery or garden center. You need only to look. Once the idea is implanted in your mind, you’ll notice these powerhouse plants. And when looking at a plant in flower at the nursery, you’ll find yourself asking: “What else does it do?”

All year, and especially through the winter, there are trees and large shrubs whose colorful or beautifully patterned bark brings as much brightness and satisfying structure and design as any flowers. Later, some will bring us vivid flowers or colorful fruits and especially fall color—but some will not.
    
On a smaller scale there are shrubs whose twigs are so brilliantly colored that they outshine the early bulbs planted below them. For some, their winter stem color is the beginning and end of their contribution to the garden, and for the rest of the year their primary function is to host to a viticella clematis. But some continue into spring with flowers, or take us through the summer with variegated foliage; some will develop fruits, and a few offer leaves that will turn colorful autumnal shades. The choice of variety is crucial.
    
As spring greets us with its surge of new growth, the bright emergence of new shoots on trees and shrubs and the fresh new growth on perennials as their shoots shoulder aside our mulch is an effect not always appreciated. And the fact is that most gardeners do not grow plants for this feature—they grow them for whatever comes next. But choose well, and a whole new phase of spring appeal becomes the opening act to summer flowers or a long season of attractive foliage.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Timber Pr
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1604692103
• ISBN 13: 9781604692105
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 282