Mediterranean Gardening

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.

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.

Celebrated landscape architect Jean Mus designs gardens that reflect his extraordinary abilities as both an artist and a horticulturalist. Mus's lavish installations display a rich spectrum of Mediterranean influences, incorporating pottery, slate walkways, sleek water channels, and Mediterranean flora. In Mediterranean Gardens, Mus invites the reader to explore twenty of the exclusive gardens that have made him famous. Dane McDowell guides us across the artist's verdant landscapes throughout southern France and into Greece and Portugal. She divulges the stories behind Mus's gardens and peppers the text with technical and reflective anecdotes from the designer himself. The sublime photographs of Vincent Motte provide inspiration to gardeners, Mediterranean buffs, and landscape designers alike.

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.

Packed with inspirational planting schemes and garden designs, this beautifully illustrated book is suitable for gardeners of all abilities.

The Essential Garden Design Workbook guides the reader through every stage of planning a garden — how to survey a site, how to choose landscaping materials, and how to develop planting schemes. This fully revised and updated second edition features new U.S. case studies and new photographs. Valuable tips on green gardening are new to this edition, and include how to harvest rainwater, how to design a green roof, tips on sustainable planting, and a guide to composting. Tailor-made for hands-on gardeners, the workbook approach is accessible, practical, and can be used to create a garden from scratch and to redesign an existing garden. Gardeners will find easy ways to measure large spaces, estimate the height of a tree, and find the right proportions for a deck. They'll also find tips on space, light, and color. Includes hundreds of easy-to-follow line drawings and diagrams.

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.