Complete Guide to Gardening and Landscaping

The clearest, easiest to use, best-illustrated, and by far the most comprehensive book of its kind. Everything you need to know to grow hundreds of flowers, trees, shrubs, and houseplants. Time and money-saving techniques for beautifying your home, or apartment, maintaining the perfect lawn, landscaping your yard, creating the garden of your dreams.

Beginning gardeners should find this book a useful single-volume guide to basic gardening techniques, garden plants and their pests and diseases, and principles of design, but anyone looking for new ideas will be disappointed. Aside from the occasional nod to organic gardening and xeriscaping principles, this is a very conservative book, focused on tried-and-true plants and the search for an immaculate lawn. The illustrations are also uneven, with good, step-by-step drawings but also photographs that are blurry, strangely developed, mislabeled, or lacking identification of pictured plants. This said, the Complete Guide nevertheless offers a great deal of good information and will probably be a valuable addition to smaller gardening collections.
- Beth Clewis, J. Sargeant Reynolds Community Coll. Lib., Richmond, Va.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.