No comments about Guidelines for Landscape & Visual Impact Assessment.

5 comments about Tropical Plants for Home and Garden.

1. Neither a good specimen guide nor glamorous coffee table showpiece, this nonetheless fills a gap in my growing library of tropical gardening books. It could be a nice introduction to tropical plants, but anyone who wants to actually garden with tropical specimens would be better served by other books, perhaps best of all, Gardening in the Tropics, ISBN: 0881923095 .

   As one reviewer points out, there are several silly mistakes. It is telling that the publisher is known for style & design books. It needed an editor with a little more botanical savvy.

   The format is clear and attractive, with huge photos and a little, nicely written text for each. The content is somewhat inconsistent. While many photographs are clear and nicely illustrative of the whole plant, some specimens are photographed in a massive mixed border some distance away. Identification, therefore, can be very frustrating. For every delight (there are, indeed, many gorgeous photos), there is a disappointment.

   Nomenclature seemed inconsistent, and local names (Indonesia, Malaysia, etc) could have been supplied by these contributors who spend much of their time in southeast Asia.

   There is no practical advice for a gardener (beyond the occasional note about something tolerating dry conditions or some such), but book doesn't pretend to be a guide book.




2. It's quite a simple formula: if you're looking to include tropical plants into your home or garden, you can't be without this book. Gorgeous color photos by Luca Invernizzi Tettoni pack a display of equally gorgeous plants accompanied by details on growing needs, propagation, cultivars, and use in home or garden environments. From ferns and succulents to gingers and bananas, a wide variety of plants of all sizes and types are covered to delight any who live in warm environments or have greenhouses to stock.
   
   Diane C. Donovan, Editor
   California Bookwatch



3. Tropical Plants for Home and Garden by William Warren is a beautifully done coffee table/reference book on many of the more commonly grown plants in the tropics. The paperback version is my second copy--having purchased the hardback edition a year ago. There is not a lot of cultural information given on the plants--it is a book devoted to plants, not a book on tropical gardening. Luca Invernizzi Tettoni's photographs, however, are vivid and very helpful in identification of the species. I am a writer of garden books, as well as the executive director of a tropical botanical garden, so I am very familiar with the plants in this book. I would recommend "Tropical Plants for Home and Garden" to anyone who gardens in Zones 10-11. Even those who live "up north" would enjoy it as a "tropical getaway".
   
   No one book is perfect, but we have many of William Warren's books on tropical plants/gardens in our reference library, and I have found all of them to be well written and to the point.



4. Great asset for my son who is a gardener!



5. Really a nice quality book. It's difficult to find books that provide good, clear photos. Wonderful coverage for its size. A real pleasure to just browse through and an excellent tool for identification. Shows not just the common plants but a few of the less known.

1 comments about Greenways for America (Creating the North American Landscape).

1. This is a great work by Mr. Little. I have learned something each time I have read it (3 or 4)! He does an excellent job of dealing with technical subjects in a very readable narrative manner.

   His way of telling the story of the history of modern trails and greenways is inspirational in that it makes you want to go out and really do something in your community. He chronicles several projects with very different origins that all have been successful.

   If you are remotely interested in greenways and trails and how projects come together I highly recommend this book.

1 comments about Connecticut Valley Vernacular: The Vanishing Landscape and Architecture of the New England Tobacco Fields.

1. While the text is pretty good and the historic pictures are fine, there should have been more contemporary photos to show the Connecticut River Valley Today and how people are using the barns today.

3 comments about Gardens of Persia.

1. What a disappointment. Beautiful pictures of archaeological sites, architectural elements, desert scenery; pretty Persian miniatures, nice diagrams and drawings BUT where are the gardens? Oh, maybe after page 100 or so we start to see photos that actually look like the garden was the main focus of the picture. That's what I get for ordering books sight unseen, huh. I gave it a 2 because it was nice for what it was and because I lived in Iran in the late 70s and there were some nostalgic moments in it for me.



2. Once again Penelope Hobhouse combines her peerless practical knowledge of plants with a passion for research and a love of garden history. In Gardens of Persia, she follows their evolution, from attempts to embody a vision of paradise to contemporary expressions of wealth and power. In all these spaces, with their distinctive template combining subtropical plants, buildings, and water, she finds that initial and powerful spiritual impulse always present, even where the imperatives of the world seem, on the surface, to be the motivation. The book is a beautiful production, with 150 specially commissioned photographs by Jerry Harpur, and a wealth of archival images and plans.



3. This book comes close to being all things to all readers. And if you don't feel like reading, you can simply enjoy the generous spread of illustrations -- maps, drawings and diagrams, beautifully reproduced Persian miniatures and above all the superb photographs by Jerry Harpur, a longtime specialist in capturing gardens and plants all over the world on film.
   
   This is much more than a picture book: the name guarantees a literate and enlightening read. This book is not about gardening in the usual sense of how to grow certain plants in particular places at specific seasons: it covers the role of gardens in the social history of thousands of years of culture. But if you have a bare terrace or balcony, you will still find more than a little incidental inspiration in these pages. This book is a vast work of research, but it remains on a human level.
   
   Armchair travelers will enjoy the rare opportunity to learn more about what is perhaps one of today's least known cultural regions. Even philosophers will find food for thought in some of the quotations from Persian and Western writers: "The real gardens and flowers are within, they are in man's heart, not outside." (Rumi The Masnavi Book IV)

No comments about Color By Color Plant Directory.

1 comments about Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850 to 1920 (Creating the North American Landscape).

1. While academic in its approach, von Hoffman tells the colorful story of Boston's political landscape -- shifting away from the independent neighborhoods toward the centralized city government. Von Hoffman focuses on the growth of Jamaica Plain, a city neighborhood which began as a group of country estates on rural Jamaica Pond and transformed by the late 1800s into a dense, vibrant streetcar suburb surrounded by the lush parkland of Frederick Law Olmstead's Emerald Necklace. Most fascinating are the chapters on neighborhood society and the struggle over the construction of the Emerald Necklace. The author ends his analysis in the 1920s, leaving the abandonment of the neighborhood and its late-century revival into a dynamic, ethnicly diverse, family-friendly city neighborhood for a later book. This text is used by Von Hoffman in the class he teaches at Harvard University.

No comments about Cesped (Jardineria Practica / Practical Gardening).

No comments about A Manual of Alpine and Rock Garden Plants.

1 comments about Landscape Design: A Practical Approach (5th Edition).

1. I went to school for landscape design but knew that I wouldn't remember every little detail. This book touches a little of everything that I learned. It has been a good resource to me.