Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24250 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
"...comprehensive..easy–to–follow..." (Amateur Gardening Magazine, April 2006)

" A splendid guide for the absolute Beginner..." ( Gardens Monthly, December 2006)

Synopsis
If you want to develop your green fingers and be part of one of the most popular pastimes in the UK, "Gardening For Dummies" is the book for you. Packed with expert advice, helping the novice get a solid start and the seasoned gardener broaden their breadth of knowledge, you can learn and develop skills in how to do everything from planning your planting to controlling pests - and everything in between. Full of useful illustrations and insider's tips, this book will be a vital reference for everyone with an interest and love of gardening, whether you have a few containers in the back yard or a huge back garden with a rolling lawn.

From the Back Cover
Includes expert advice on planning your vegetable and herb garden

Your hands–on guide to one of the UK′s most popular pastimes

Whether you′re a budding novice or a green–fingered enthusiast, Gardening For Dummies is the book for you. It covers every aspect of the subject, from planning and designing your planting to controlling pests, and is abundant with straightforward advice and expert tips to broaden your gardening know–how. Follow this advice, and your garden will be blooming!

Discover how to

• Choose your plants and put them in the right place
• Keep your lawn luscious
• Tell your annuals from your perennials
• Create a garden in a small space
• Grow plants from bulbs and seeds

Customer Reviews

Worthless for Novice Gardeners!
I bought this book as I moved to a house with a large garden. I assumed this book would be able to help me to tend/care for various plants in the garden. The title and descpription led me to assume that I'd find out useful things like when/if to prune things. What to do with tomato plants (budding, pollinating, watering information), and maybe even a chart that tells a novice when to do key tasks.

Nothing like this at all - for tomato you will find out that they are a greenhouse plant (no, really!) and for apple trees, you will find out that you need to go to an 'Apple Day' at a large garden in your area!!

So if you get a house with an established garden, and not buying a house with a blank plot of earth - this is not the book for you. Really disappointing.

Gardening without pictures
I bought this as a gift for someone who really needs basic gardening instruction. The only photographs it has are 20 photographs of flowers; not a single photo showing how to do things. Diagrams are limited to around one per chapter too. I returned it as it simply was not fit for purpose. For example, the chapter on pruning and propagating had one basic outline diagram on pruning and one on propagating - hardly enough to help a dummy. I recommend instead the RHS Encyclopedia of Gardening, or RHS Month by Month gardening. The latter answers the question "what should I be doing in my garden this weekend?", the former answers the question "and how do I do it?", and for the dummies amongst us, there are millions of pictures, diagrams and photos to back up the text.

A lovely, comprehensive book
I bought this book for my daughter who has just moved into her first house with a garden, but ended up reading it myself! It's a comprehensive guide to gardening which is intended for beginners, but as someone who's done some gardening in their time, I found some really useful advice here, as it goes into a fair bit of detail on topics such as lawns and special topics such as containder gardens and gardens for wildlife. There's also a 'tear-out' gardening calendar at the front of the book that tells you what to do when, at a glance. I found this book had far more useful information in it than many of the 'glossy' gardening books out there, and is jargon-free and non-patronising. Highly recommended!