Synopses & Reviews
Home gardeners know the key elements to a well-designed garden: perennials that bloom year after year, annuals that add a burst of color, and bulbs that guarantee spring flowers. But what about shrubs--what role should these hardy plants play?
The Creative Shrub Garden by Andy McIndoe puts the shrub in its rightful place--front and center. This groundbreaking approach shows you how to make the most of the many benefits of shrubs--including their hardiness, year-long beauty, size, and low-maintenance nature--by making them the main element in a garden design. McIndoe teaches you the basics first, with tips on choosing shrubs based on a garden's size, determining soil and climate needs, and pruning and maintenance. He then offers hundreds of shrub combinations that work with 15 main garden styles, including coastal, cottage, Mediterranean, tropical, urban, and more.
The Creative Shrub Garden celebrates a plant that is too often taken for granted and gives gardeners the confidence to use shrubs in the design-forward treatment they deserve.
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"His plant directory is rich and colorful...and his style is assuredly instructional." Library Journal
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"Shrubs play a key part in gardening, as McIndoe so clearly explains in this guide highlighting their year-round beauty and maintenance....This comprehensive text [is] sure to please gardeners who love perennials." Booklist
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“Home gardeners will appreciate this guide to the humble shrub with its glossy color photos and multitude of suggestions for staging and pairing plants.” The American Reference Book Annual
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“A realistic and good-value book for when planting inspiration eludes.” Gardens Illustrated
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“The author, managing director of Hillier Nurseries and Garden Centres in Hampshire, England, knows his shrubs. His advice on how to combine shrubs visually and culturally, on pruning, growing shrubs in containers, and planting for seasonal interest are so useful.” Pacific Northwest Magazine
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“The shrub-curious will find a lot to ponder . . . plenty of pictures pack the pages, illustrating the chapters and sparking ideas of your own.”
The Kitsap Sun
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“This is a book to treasure and use.”
The Cottage Garden
Synopsis
In The Creative Shrub Garden, author Andy McIndoe calls on his years of horticultural design experience to shine light on all of the innovative ways to stylishly work shrubs into your landscape. This is a new approach to planning your garden--by mood and style. Whether it's an urban contemporary look, a cottage garden feel, or an uplifting an environment, The Creative Shrub Garden has a wealth of eye-catching combinations that bring new life to this classic plant.
Synopsis
Shrubs have the widest range of colored foliage, headiest scents, and most persistent flowers of all the plant groups. They are longer-lived than perennials and require half as much maintenance. This unashamedly shrub-centric design guide describes how to choose the right plants for the right place, and mix and match them in groups that bring year-round pleasure. Award-winning designer Andy McIndoe offers ready-made combinations that deliver a range of moods and styles for gardens of all sizes, the basics of designing with shrubs, and a comprehensive plant directory.
About the Author
Andy McIndoe is managing director of Hillier Nurseries and Garden Centres in Hampshire, England. As designer of the Hillier exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show for more than two decades, he has upheld the company’s unprecedented record of 68 consecutive gold medals at the show. His two-acre garden at Sherfield English near Romsey is naturalistic in style, with an extensive wildflower meadow and informal planting.