Tending Your Garden : A Year-round Guide to Garden Maintenance

How to keep any garden looking its best, through the seasons and through the years.

Gardening is the primary recreational activity of Americans. Since the 1980s, when gardening caught fire as a national passion, we have spent billions of dollars on what we grow for our own pleasure; and in all that time, not one book has been published on the broad subject of garden maintenance.

For twenty-five years, the Haywards, expert horticultural consultants and authors of many books and articles, have been tending their own garden in Vermont. Here, beautiful photographs illustrate how and what the Haywards do in their garden from earliest spring until snowfall: pruning trees and shrubs; planting, staking, and dividing perennials; and edging, deadheading, and weeding. They also include many tips for reducing maintenance. Their advice can be put to work in the reader's garden, regardless of size or location. Line drawings by Elayne Sears give more details on specific techniques. Anecdotal, encouraging, and crammed with information, this is a gorgeous treatment of a very practical subject. 237 photographs, 16 drawings

Gordon Hayward, an acclaimed garden designer and lecturer, is the author of five previous books. His wife, Mary Hayward, grew up gardening in the Cotswolds in England. They live and garden in Westminster, Vermont.

Mary Hayward, grew up gardening in the Cotswolds in England.

Richard W. Brown moved to Vermont in 1968, where he taught in a small rural school before embarking on a career in photography. His work has appeared in Vermont Life, Harrowsmith Country Life, Audubon, Natural History, The New York Times, Country Journal, and many other publications. He also wrote and photographed My Kind of Garden, The Private World of Tasha Tudor, Richard Brown's New England, Moments in Eden, and Pictures from the Country. He is the photographer of Tasha Tudor's Garden, Garden Whimsy, and The View from the Kingdom. He lives in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom.