Bringing The Mediterranean Into Your Garden

Mediterranean garrigue landscapes are extraordinarily beautiful: alternating mounds of silver and green, textured leaves, flashes of colour and intoxicating scents combine to delight the senses and rival any cultivated garden with half the work. This book offers inspiration and expert advice on growing the plants and adopting a new more natural way of gardening. Mediterranean plants are diverse and adapted to a wide range of environments and weather conditions. They are of course ideally suited to regions which experience long periods of seasonal drought but many will also withstand periods of high rainfall and extreme cold making this book essential reading for temperate-zone gardeners seeking the Mediterranean look. Some understanding of plant ecology is essential for success and Filippi shares his expert knowledge acquired from decades of research. How a plant interacts with its environment, other plants, and other living things indicates what it needs to flourish in a garden setting.

Coastal gardeners throughout the United States will benefit from the advice in this practical, inspirational, and illustrated book on Mediterranean gardening, which is beautiful year-round.

Making a garden that can withstand summer drought without irrigation is the dream of many who wish to garden in harmony with the environment. In this classic work on gardening in dry climates, first published in 2008, Olivier Filippi offers practical advice to achieve this goal based on his, and his wife Clara's, experience of working with Mediterranean-region plants for more than 30 years. The first part of the book examines the behavior of plants that face drought in their natural habitat. What is drought and how do plants manage to survive when little water is available? The second part is concerned with gardening techniques in a dry climate. How do you prepare the soil, when do you plant, and how do you maintain a dry garden? The third and longest part describes in detail no less than 500 rewarding plants that are well-adapted to dry gardens, each classified by a unique dry resistance code. The Dry Gardening Handbook is essential reading for gardeners who live in one of the world's Mediterranean climate zones and will also be of interest to gardeners in areas where drought is becoming a recurring problem.

Whether you are cultivating a dry, sunny southern slope, or a flat, damp northern plot you can create a garden full of Mediterranean style and colour. This book takes you through all the processes, from getting your soil into shape, growing vegetables from seed, to painting terracotta pots.

A large-format, beautifully illustrated, complete guide to gardening in a California and Mediterraean-like climates, defined as ones in which winters are wet and summers are bone dry.

“Presents work from throughout the region, whether a lushly layered property in the Tuscan countryside or a Zen-inspired plot on the French island of Corsica.” —Architectural Digest Human beings have been transforming Mediterranean landscapes into art for at least 30,000 years. Today, artists, sculptors, designers, architects, and gardeners explore age-old materials, skills, and sites to produce extraordinary landscape art that celebrates life in this multifaceted region. Each work here, whether in France, Greece, Italy, Morocco, or Spain, observes the logic of place as determined by climate, geology, flora and fauna, architecture, and land use. Creative talents from many contexts meet in these pages, such as Gilles Clément and Andy Goldsworthy, Nicole de Vésian and Ian Hamilton Finlay, Arnaud Maurieres and Eric Ossart, Mary Keen, herman de vries, and Paolo Pejrone. Illustrated with hundreds of photos by award-winning photographer Clive Nichols, and drawing on thirty years of exploration by Louisa Jones, this book offers an inspiring vision of the Mediterranean, linking cultural diversity and natural balance as discovered in its gardens, landscape design, literature, art, and architecture.

You can create a truly beautiful garden using exciting and exotic plants, yet at the same time eliminate the need for extra water and reduce the maintenance required. Your garden will be lush, full of colour and interest all year round, and rather than constantly weeding, watering and working, you can relax in your own Mediterranean haven. Book jacket

First published in French as Alternatives au gazon in 2011.