Botany for Gardeners, 3rd Edition

I ordered this for a college course a while back and found it very helpful. The information is communicated well and I found it incredibly interesting. Great book :]

easy to understand

This book was recommended in the Master Gardener program. It is very readable with lots of useful photos and diagrams. It makes a difficult subject easy to understand. Highly recommended.

Anyone who has been reading gardening books for a while is bound to start wondering about the underlying science. This is the perfect introductory book. It's rigorous, but there's still room to toss out the occasional interesting fact, such as grasses evolved their unique ability to regrow leaves in response to grazing animals. Or tropical trees have no rings. Worth a dozen ordinary gardening books.

Absolutely fascinating book, written with an obvious awe and love of the plant kingdom. Pictures are great; so are drawings. Author makes very clear what can be a complicated subject. Really renews one's love of gardening. Included are a few practical hints as well. Tells how plants are constructed and how they grow; all about each part of a flower; what happens to water after roots draw it from the soil; a most readable explanation of photosynthesis, why gardeners prune, all about stems and roots, what happens inside seeds, etc. I really learned a lot. Especially about why certain gardening practices are beneficial to plants - why we do the things we do, and the true miracle of life that plants are. We exist because of the life of plants.

Now in a newly revised edition, Botany For Gardeners is an instructional, scientific text written specifically in everyday language for gardeners, horticulturalists, and lay people. Author Brian Capon, a former professor of botany with thirty years' experience, explains how plants are structured, how they adapt to their environment, how water is transported from soil to leaves, why minerals, air, and light are important for healthy plant growth, how plants reproduce, and much more. Black-and-white diagrams and color photographs illustrate this superb self-teaching tool for the truly dedicated gardening enthusiast.

Capon gets down to business and explains how plants work. No more will the reader/gardener utter such pablum as "pinching forces energy down instead of up in the plant." She/he will intelligently note that pinching the apical meristem decreases the hormones that control upward growth, thus increasing the activity of hormones controlling lateral growth. Very well explained facts about how plants do what they do.