The Complete Gardener

The Complete Gardener is the most comprehensive, practical and creative book yet produced for the gardening enthusiast. Whether you are starting from scratch, remodeling an existing garden, enhancing your home with hanging baskets and window boxes or planning a focal point for a favorite room, this is the book for you. It is both practical manual and creative source-book—a unique blend of the art and science of gardening.
In PART 1 John Brookes offers the outdoor gardener a wealth of information about planning, building, planting, and maintaining every conceivable type of garden—from country garden to city rooftop; from rock gardens and patios to pools and woodland glades.
For the indoor gardener and creative homeowner, PART 2 is both a comprehensive guide to choosing, growing and caring for indoor plants, and a source-book of stylish ideas for arranging flowers, grouping plants and planning decorative room schemes. Starting with a stunning photographic guide to the color, texture, size and shape of plants, the author demonstrates and explains all the basic principles of successful plant display-from choosing containers and coordinating colors to constructing decorative features that will enhance any room, staircase or open space and bring the special, magical effect of the garden right into your home.

Billing itself as "the most comprehensive, practical, and creative book yet produced for the gardening enthusiast," The Complete Gardener has some very lofty ambitions. The author, John Brookes, is a respected landscape designer whose work might be familiar to readers of Good Housekeeping and House and Garden. Here he's taken his extensive knowledge and divided it into the two general categories of outdoor and indoor gardening, leaving no stone unturned in either arena. More of an encyclopedia than a typical gardening book, this extensive volume certainly can't be accused of being misnamed. Whether it achieves its stated goals is up to individual interpretation. However, there are sections covering nearly every conceivable gardening situation--from a town garden with a backdrop to a rural garden with a barn, caring for bonsai to arranging dried flowers--and with such a wide range of topics there is hardly a subject imaginable that this book doesn't address. The ample text is informative and quite detailed, supporting photos and illustrations are used liberally, and numerous charts are provided for quick reference and to summarize larger sections. While some of the photography appears dated, especially the shots depicting the use of plants in interior design, the related information and advice is generally timeless in its theory and suggested application. --George Laney