Product Description

This full-color guide from the experts at Burpee shows you how to plan, plant, and maintain a beautiful flower garden using an environmentally responsible, organic approach. It offers authoritative guidance on creating borders and beds, combining flower colors and shapes, selecting gardening tools, and much more, and features encyclopedic Plant Portraits section with profiles of more than 175 flowers—annuals, perennials, and bulbs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #537981 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

From the Inside Flap
Whether you want to start with a container flower garden to brighten a patio or create a landscape as lush as a Monet painting, this is the book for you. Burpee—The Complete Flower Gardener takes you from the ground up, with information on everything from choosing a site and preparing the soil to nourishing your flowers to full bloom and solving specific gardening problems. The authoritative yet unintimidating style of award-winning gardening writers Karan Davis Cutler and Barbara W. Ellis is perfect for beginners, while their in-depth knowledge makes this book invaluable to veteran flower gardeners.

Following an environmentally responsible, organic approach to flower gardening, Burpee—TheComplete Flower Gardener shows you how to assess local growing conditions and your site, and how to plan, plant, and maintain your garden. It presents ideas for creating borders and beds; tips on combining flower colors, shapes, and textures; advice about caring for your garden; counsel on buying must-have gardening tools; guidelines for avoiding a chemically dependent garden; and more. It also untangles the scores of terms you need to know as you choose your seeds or plants at a local nursery or peruse the colorful pages of a seductive garden catalog. The encyclopedic Plant Portraits section provides thorough profiles of more than 175 herbaceous flowers—annuals, perennials, andbulbs—with directions for choosing cultivars, cultivating and propagating them, and combining them with other plants in the garden. Gorgeous color photographs accompany every entry.

Whether used on its own or as the perfect companionto Burpee—The Complete Gardener and Burpee—The Complete Vegetable and Herb Gardener, thisbook has everything you could want or need to make your flower garden thrive.

From the Back Cover
"Gardens are beautiful and interesting, but every hands-on gardener knows that the word 'garden' isa verb, not just a noun. It's not only the garden, it's I garden, he and she garden, you garden, we garden, they garden. And, frankly, that's the real fun of the whole business."
—Karan Davis Cutler

"Life-long learning is an under-appreciated benefit of growing a flower garden. Each new season brings with it new plants to grow, old friends to tend, combinations to discover, and fresh techniques to try. What could be more satisfying and consuming?"
—Barbara W. Ellis

Make flower gardening even more enriching and rewarding with Burpee—The Complete Flower Gardener. The ultimate authority, it helps you get going and growing with:

• Informative Plant Portraits of more than 175 plants —from Achilles to Zinnia—including the heirloom flowers your grandmother loved as well as today's plant breeders' newest cultivars
• Invaluable guidance on everything from planning and planting your pot or plot to choosing tools to gardening with children
• Environmentally friendly solutions to common problems—both caused by conditions in your site and by wildlife, diseases, and bugs
• Information on special gardens — with details on creating a Butterfly Garden, an Edible Garden, a Hillside Garden, a Perennial Cutting Garden, and more

About the Author
KARAN DAVIS CUTLER has received eight Quill and Trowel awards from the Garden Writers of America. Her articles have appeared in Horticulture, The American Gardener, Organic Gardening, Harrowsmith Country Life, and other publications. A former magazine editor, she is the author of many books, including Burpee—The Complete Vegetable and Herb Gardener (1997, 2006), Flowering Vines: Beautiful Climbers (1999), The New England Gardener's Book of Lists (2000), and Pruning Trees, Shrubs & Vines (2003). She grows flowers and vegetables on thirteen acres in northern Vermont.

BARBARA ELLIS, a freelance writer and editor, is the author of many gardening books, including Taylor's Guide to Growing North America's Favorite Plants (1998), Deckscaping (2002), and Shady Retreats (2003). She was publications director for the American Horticultural Society and editor of The American Gardener, and for more than a decade was managing editor of garden books for Rodale Press. She tends an organic, wildlife-friendly garden filled with flowers in Maryland on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

Customer Reviews

Two Green Thumbs Up!
I like intelligent garden writing that is both engaging and friendly. Nothing puts me off more than dry or condescending writing, and if it puts off a seasoned gardener, it will intimidate and discourage a newbie. Happily, Burpee Complete Flower Gardener by Karan Davis Cutler & Barbara Ellis is one of those kitchen-table books; where reading it makes us feel like we're chatting with a couple of fellow gardeners at our kitchen table.
Cutler and Ellis love growing flowers, and it shows--and the real beauty about this book is that it focuses on an organic approach to flower gardening. They write with wisdom and humour, and the 488 pages are packed with practical information AND seasoned with lovely photos.
The book is divided into two sections. Part one is Flower Gardening from the Ground Up, which takes readers through the basics of plants, soils, creating new beds, and the art of tending, planting and dealing with problems in the garden. The second part is Plant Portraits, which I like because it profiles nearly 200 different annuals and perennials, including some that often aren't given the attention they deserve. The profiles are each several pages long, including information on how to grow and what species or cultivars to look for. In a world where new plant selections are as numerous and varied as fashions off designer runways, Cutler and Ellis don't try to mention all the newest of the new; but with this volume in your library, you'll have the confidence to go try a new coneflower or zinnia or astilbe.