English Cottage Gardening: For American Gardeners, Revised Edition Overview
Thanks to the extraordinary photographs and gardening wisdom in this classic book, the elegant intimacy of the English cottage garden is a practical possibility for amateur gardeners in diverse regions of the United States. The author has analyzed the aesthetic and horticultural elements in ten representative cottage gardens--eight in England and two in the United States. Her spectacular photographs render the look and atmosphere of these gardens, while her text focuses on easily grown, readily available plants that are adaptable to a wide variety of climatic and soil conditions. In the back of the book--completely updated for this new edition--may be found specific horticultural information on a wide variety of cottage garden plants commonly available in the United States, glossaries of Latin and common names, and a list of sources for old rose varieties. The gardens in this beautiful book are not those of the great estates of England, manicured by staffs of professional gardeners. They are, instead, labors of love on the part of individual homeowners, many of whom started with bleak, rubble-strewn lots and went on to create the enchanted settings pictured here.
Customer Reviews
This is a garden book to keep by the side of your easy chair. Every time I pick it up, I start reading and enjoy the straight forward descriptions and plant recommendations and flower combinations.
I've made the mistake of ordering a book or two from the internet only to find that "English Gardening" is all about estate gardening. Lovely, but I don't own an estate. Margaret Hensel has traveled through England and brought back practical advice about how to get the look of a small, intimate garden outside English cottages not castles.
It's an easy read of information about what makes a cottage garden have the charm and intimacy that I think of when I envision my own plot of land. There are diagrams of the landscapes as well.
There's encouragement about what makes a English cottage garden rather than the usual approach that it's not possible to create this kind of garden outside of England. So many books fall short because they begin with this premise and this leads to how to add tropical plants or other such nonsense.
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