Product Description

This practical guide shows how to grow decorative flowers and foliage and use them to create floral arrangements plans, plant and maintain a well-stocked cutting garden, and demonstrates how to create arrangements ranging from simple bunches to romantic hanging globes, swags and medallions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8926 in Books
• Published on: 1996-10-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 168 pages

Review
... a joyous book, with wonderfully detailed photographs by Pia Tryde (01/10/2006 Woman & Home )

... a stunningly beautiful book for flower arrangers, where glorious photographs are backed up by sound, practical advice (Practical Gardening )

About the Author
Sarah Raven, writer, cook, broadcaster and teacher, is an expert on all things to grow, cut and eat from your garden. She runs cooking, flower arranging and gardening courses from her farm in East Sussex and is the author of several books on gardening, including The Cutting Garden, which won the Garden Writers' Guild Award for Best Specialist Gardening Book in 1993. She also writes for national newspapers and magazines and is a presenter on BBC Gardeners' World. Sarah is married to the writer Adam Nicolson and has two daughters and three stepsons. They live at Perch Hill Farm in East Sussex.

Pia Tryde is an internationally-acclaimed photographer. She lives in Sutton, Suffolk.

Customer Reviews

This excellent book is a pleasure to read and to look at.
I bought this book originally as a resource for planning my own wedding flowers. That was a year ago now, and ever since that time I have been able to dip in and out of it for information, inspiration and pure pleasure. Sarah Raven gives an overview of how to create a cutting garden from scratch, her book drawing on her own experience of her beautiful cutting garden in Sussex. She also has useful chapters on flower arranging through the seasons. Everything has a distinctive modern/romantic edge to it. The photography throughout is fantastic. Photographs not only illustrate different types and shapes of flower arrangements but also accompany a glossary of Sarah's own favourite range of flowers for cutting. This book can be recommended for anyone who has a love of flowers, gardening or entertaining.

Still a worthwhile investment so long after publication.
Having already got hold of "Grow your own cut flowers" by the same author, I agonised for a long time about whether to buy this as well. Although there is some repetition, there is also a lot of different material. There are more arrangements and techniques in this book than in the later "Grow your own...", more detail on floristry equipment, and more information about more plants, which are organised by time of year and colour in this book, rather than by bulb/perennial/annual/half hardy annual, etc.

Although the styling of some of the photos is perhaps a little dated, the arrangements still look fresh and modern, and could be adapted if you want something a little less prescriptive. My only real complaint is that you would need a very extensive garden to grow as much as she suggests you would require for the really impressive arrangements (highly invasive, pond-liner wrecking bulrushes? Really?), which would not be practical for most people.

However, this book is very much a step up in volume of flowers and scale of arrangements from "How to Grow Your Own Cut Flowers". If you are after larger scale and more variety, this is definitely a worthwhile buy.

(If you want to see more pages, search for it on google books - more are available than on "Search Inside" here.)