Landscape Magic : Tricks and Techniques for Rejuvenating Old Yards and Gardens

In many established yards and gardens, plants have peaked -reached maturity and gone beynd. Every garden needs periodic sprucing up. Here's the tool. Written by a professional greenhouse owner, Landscape Magic covers annuals, perennials, deciduous and evergreen trees, berry patches, and orchards. It provides practical advice on maintaining flowering shrubs, lawns, and vegetable gardens.

Annuals get leggy, invasive perennials crowd out weaker ones, flowering shrubs plead for pruning, fruit trees stop bearing and hedges overgrow. Green presents solutions to all these problems. His magic depends on compost, pruning shears and shovels, plus the knowledge and the motivation to use these tools. Green, who runs a commercial nursery in Ontario, tells how to rejuvenate annuals, perennials, flowering shrubs, roses, evergreen shrubs, vines, trees, small fruits and lawns. Describing himself as a "lazy gardener" who prefers wandering in the garden to weeding it, Green provides detailed instructions that make pruning a monster shrub seem like a plausible endeavor. He also offers high-, medium- and low-maintenance approaches to lawns, a welcome recognition of the varying amounts of time and effort people are willing or able to invest. Helpful features, including clear and extensive pruning diagrams, plant propagation lists and an annotated bibliography, round out this bag of gardening tricks.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Green gives expert advice on getting annuals to increase their blooms, keeping perennials healthy and flowering, and "renovating" flowering shrubs, roses, evergreen shrubs, vines, trees, small-fruit plants, and lawns. Each chapter focuses on a specific range of plants or gardening conditions. Two additional chapters deal with improving soil structure and with garden maintenance. Color photographs and illustrations carefully augment the text. There's no magic offered here, but Green's commonsense approach and attention to detail make this an invaluable guide to getting any garden back in shape. George Cohen