Product Description

In this book, pioneering garden designers Henk Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf describe their special choice of ideal plants – perennials, bulbs, grasses, ferns and small shrubs. An ideal plant is one that is both beautiful and robust, performing reliably with very little input from the gardener. Complete growing information is provided for each plant along with advice on how to use it to best effect.

Gerritsen and Oudolf have a genuinely innovative approach to gardening. Rather than striving for big, bold masses of colourful blooms that are vigorously pruned back as soon as they have finished flowering, the authors choose plants chiefly for their form - leaves, flower heads and stems included - which means they retain their natural beauty through all the seasons.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50143 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 144 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Gardeners are moving away from tidy borders and neat velvet lawns to more expressive areas of plants grown within a natural movement of design. Who better to explain how to do this than the Dutch international garden designers, Henk Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf. Dream Plants for the Natural Garden suggests 1,200 plant species which they consider practical for the average garden. Each is give its Latin and common name with a brief description and notes of favourable conditions and flowering period.

The book covers perennials, bulbs, grasses, ferns and small shrubs, all of which the authors believe will continue growing, flowering and seeding for many years There are three main sections covering tough (perennials, grasses, ferns, bulbs and shrubs), playful (self-seeding perennials, biennials and annuals) and troublesome plants (invasive, capricious and demanding), explaining how to deal with them. Piet Oudolf has nurseries near Arnheim where he is practised in choosing plants that are easy to maintain and mainly disease resistant. Both he and Henk Gerritsen took many of the photographs that illustrate the text.

Dream Plants for the Natural Garden is an ideal reference book. Use some of the ideas to enliven your own garden or create an imaginative new one. --Judy Wyles

Review
... a thorough knowledge of the ways of plants, an upbeat but realistic tone, and a lively and forthright writing style should commend this book to anyone with a thoughtful gardener to please (Independent )

... the plants themselves are excellent and well known to the authors who pass on their thorough and amusing cultivation notes alongside glamorous colour photographs (Times )

... an invaluable directory of hardy plants for anyone considering new-style naturalistic planting (Country Living )

Gardening Which? December 2001
'This book does exactly what is says on the cover'

Customer Reviews

If you only want one book on herbaceous perrenials, buy this
Quite simply the most useful book on herbaceous plants you will ever need. By grouping the plants by how they behave in your garden Oudolf and Gerritsen have taken all the guesswork out of herbaceous planting. Clear plates, teamed with the author's concentration on only the best varieties of each species help to choose the most appropriate plants. As a professional garden designer I have taken to keeping a copy of the book in my car, and referring to their classifications before buying. This practical advice teamed with Europe's most respected plantsmen's own personal tastes has led me to use plants I had never heard of. Such simple descriptions as "Grows anywhere and is always beautiful, use it" can only inspire. Their advice is so good that you ignore it at your peril, I recently bought some Thalictrum that they specifically warned against as they fall over, I bought some anyway, and watched them grow, start to flower and fall over.

Inspirational, outstanding and thought provoking
I had never really considered perennials to be such an important and rewarding part of the planting scheme before reading this book. Most of them seemed to be hard work in terms of effort repaid. This book helped to open my eyes to the possibilities of using perennials and the fact that they needn't be very demanding.

Fantastic Book
Perfect introduction to perennial plants and natural gardening techniques. Lists of bomb proof plants. This book can save you a lot of money so you don't buy plants that die after the first year. It also gives you confidence to try new shapes, colours and forms. It writing style is concise and at time very entertaining.
Very inspiring.