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Powerhouse Plants, 510 Top Performers for Multi-Season Beauty Reviewed By Allan Becker of Bookpleasures.com
http://www.bookpleasures.com/websitepublisher/articles/5791/1/Powerhouse-Plants-510-Top-Performers-for-Multi-Season-Beauty-Reviewed-By-Allan-Becker-of-Bookpleasurescom/Page1.html
Allan Becker

Reviewer Allan Becker: Allan has been designing and planting flower gardens, since he was a teenager in the 1960's. Now retired from the soft goods industry, where he held several positions in design, product development, and marketing, he has turned his passion for gardening into a second career, as a garden designer for private clients in Montreal, Canada.


In spring and summer, he provides his assistants, most college students, who transform his designs into flower gardens. In winter, he reviews books on garden-related topics for Bookpleasures.com and writes a Gardening Blog.

Allan earned a B.A. from McGill University, followed by two years of studies in design at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia). He lives in the Montreal suburb of Cote St. Luc, Quebec with his wife and travels regularly to Toronto and Boston to visit his children and grandchildren.




 
By Allan Becker
Published on February 4, 2013
 


Author: Graham Rice

Publisher: Timber Press

ISBN-13:978-1-60469-210-5


Author: Graham Rice

Publisher: Timber Press

ISBN-13:978-1-60469-210-5

Graham Rice is an international renowned and respected plantsman with gardening experience on both sides of the Atlantic. He is also an award-winning writer with more than twenty gardening books to his credit.

This latest work reaches out to readers who garden on small plots of land where plants must do double duty because there is room for so few of them. To create beautiful and interesting gardens under these confining conditions, Mr. Rice recommends that we consider using versatile powerhouse plants.

Such plants enhance the design of small gardens because they multi task throughout the growing season. Included in this category are perennials, shrubs, trees, ornamental grasses, vines and ground cover, all of which put on visual performances that last longer than their respective plant tags indicate. They do that by transforming themselves from a flowering summer perennial, for example, into a display of intensely colored fall foliage.

The inherent potential of these versatile players allows the gardener to create different and evolving plant combinations for various times of the year, all the while using a minimum number of plants.

Readers will be delighted that the author’s suggestions are confined to ones that are easy to grow, hardy, and glorious performers. Nothing makes a gardener happier than to discover that a beautiful plant is also a workhorse and that it requires little attention.

In that respect, nature has been very cooperative. Mr. Rice has managed to identify no less than five hundred and ten of these powerhouse plants – each with characteristics that evolve or linger in the garden, and whose beauty and visual interest is sustained long after they have lost one of their salient features.

Such a plant will display at least two of the following attributes: - spring shoots pushing through the soil, fresh unfurling foliage, spring flowers, summer flowers, summer foliage, attractive fruit and berries, evergreen foliage, vibrant colors in the fall, bark, interesting and colorful stems in winter, and winter or spring foliage rosettes.

Of course the above list doesn’t even begin to address other characteristics that a plant make contribute to the garden. These would include form, shape, texture, movement, fragrance, birds, and butterflies. All are qualities that enhance the value of most of the recommended plants in this book.

Gardeners who struggle to maximize the visual appeal of their small gardens will be relieved that there is now a handbook to help make that an easier task. Creative homeowners with larger gardens will also benefit because versatile, all-season, powerhouse plants enrich the appearance of all gardens, regardless of their size.


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