Growing Perennials In Cold Climates

Beginning with the 50 best perennial groups to grow in cold climates, this book details both the good and bad news about these plants in a reader-friendly, easy-to-follow fashion. 320 color photos. Available

Originally published: Lincolnwood, Ill.: Contemporary Books, c1998.

Will help you visualize how you can enrich your landscape with carefully selected shrubs and small trees.

Describes both traditional and newer methods of winter protecting roses in cold climates, offering an expanded catalog of rose plants, profiles of major clases of roses, and instructions to achive ideal growing conditions.

Gardening with Native Grasses in Cold Climates, is written for inexperienced as well as seasoned gardeners, landscape designers, garden center employees, and anyone interested in native grasses that grow well in cold climates. New information on the benefits of native grasses including their importance as host plants for native Lepidoptera is included. Combinations of specific grasses used by larvae and perennials that the adult butterflies feed on is new and timely information.

A cold climate is no excuse for a dull, colorless garden. The key is knowing the right plants that will survive and thrive in even the chilliest environments. Who better to guide gardeners than an expert from the far north? Award-winning designer and Alaska gardener Brenda Adams has spent decades searching for exceptional plants that flourish in wintery climates. In Cool Plants for Cold Climates, she presents vivid and detailed portraits of the best and most beautiful of the bunch. When Adams moved from the warm Southwest to Alaska, she found herself in a different gardening world, with few guides on how to approach this new ecosystem. Now, more than twenty-five years later, she shares the secrets gained from her years of gardening experiments as well as bountiful advice from friends and local nurseries. She explains how to evaluate a plant, balancing its artistic attributes with its more utilitarian ones, as well as how to evaluate your space and soil. Adams then takes you into the nursery, offering guidance on how to pick the best of the best. Finally, she offers a detailed look at a wide variety of wonderful plants, highlighting those that offer overall beauty, are especially easy to care for, and solidly hardy. With more than three hundred vivid pictures of both individual plants and full gardens, Adams proves that there is a bounty of plants, in a rainbow of colors, waiting to brighten up your space.

When Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates moved into a duplex in a run-down part of Holyoke, Massachusetts, the tenth-of-an-acre lot was barren ground and bad soil, peppered with broken pieces of concrete, asphalt, and brick. The two friends got to work designing what would become not just another urban farm, but a "permaculture paradise" replete with perennial broccoli, paw paws, bananas, and moringa—all told, more than two hundred low-maintenance edible plants in an innovative food forest on a small city lot. The garden—intended to function like a natural ecosystem with the plants themselves providing most of the garden's needs for fertility, pest control, and weed suppression—also features an edible water garden, a year-round unheated greenhouse, tropical crops, urban poultry, and even silkworms. In telling the story of Paradise Lot, Toensmeier explains the principles and practices of permaculture, the choice of exotic and unusual food plants, the techniques of design and cultivation, and, of course, the adventures, mistakes, and do-overs in the process. Packed full of detailed, useful information about designing a highly productive permaculture garden, Paradise Lot is also a funny and charming story of two single guys, both plant nerds, with a wild plan: to realize the garden of their dreams and meet women to share it with. Amazingly, on both counts, they succeed.