Gardening with Conifers

This book is a gorgeous, mouth-watering treatise on gardening with conifers. The photography accompanying the garden descriptions is spectacular with conifers shown in all kinds of light as well as different seasons. It makes you want to begin your gardens all over again using nothing but conifers!

This book is recommended by the American Conifer Society. It is useful for both the beginner and more experienced conifer gardener. It is well organized and clearly written. A handy reference tool for those planning a garden or if you just want to check out a plant you saw in a garden or nursery. A must get for gardeners who take the hobby seriously. Besides a comprehensive list of plants, it goes into related topics such as how to use conifers in the garden, how to prune them, etc.

I do landscape design and landscape maintenance professionally, and this is the number one book I reach for when I have a question about conifers, or simply need some inspiration for how to use one in a garden. This book combines gorgeous pictures of the individual plants and of their use in the garden, with incredibly thorough text. The first part of the book includes brief but interesting information about the benefits using conifers in the garden, how conifers grow, and the origins and naming of garden conifers. Then he moves on to discuss, in greater depth, the different attributes you find in a lot of the more interesting conifers, like the differences and beauty of their cones, buds and new growth, bark, foliage colors, and the interesting forms and sizes available, to help you know what to look for and help you appreciate the truly unique attributes of garden conifers. Then he moves on to my favorite part and a large portion of the book, Using Conifers in the Garden. The entire book is filled with gorgeous color photos suggesting plants to use in combination with conifers of every type, but this section outdoes itself with the amazing color photographs of the author's giant estate and the small vignettes he puts together using grasses, heathers, rhodies, and flowering perennials to accent conifers. This is incredibly inspiring and shows the huge number of ways you can combine conifers with other plants. The written portions are amazing in this and the other sections as well. He discusses the different ways to use conifers in a garden to achieve different goals, ways of pruning and caring for your conifers to get different effects (Bonsai and Japanese gardening is discussed), conifers as container plants, hedges, windbreaks and screens, petite conifers for small gardens, and conifers as ground covers. Last of all, he includes a directory of more than 600 outstanding conifers, including color photos on every page. Bloom knows his conifers well, and gives accurate and time-tested information on growth rates, habits, pest issues or problems, conditions needed, etc. His favorites merit glowing descriptions and praise, and his favorites have often ended up my favorites too, once I have had a chance to grow them. The writing is simple to understand and would be accessable to a beginning to intermediate gardener, yet is absolutely depthy enough for the professional, and is a resource that once you get ahold of, you will not want to give up. It is great as an encyclopedic reference on garden conifers, and great for inspiration, instruction, and design advice.

This book has gorgeous photographs of conifers of all sizes in many configurations, nicely complemented with other perennials and shrubs, and shown in different seasons, climates, and light conditions. He explains how conifers work (which seemed a bit mysterious to me-- growth, cones, etc.), provides useful information on pruning, propagation, growth rates, and his son's beautiful photographs help you picture the overall habit of the plants in relation to others you might want to grow. He encourages gardeners to experiment with varieties even if they need to be moved or removed entirely in 10 or 20 or 30 years. And then there is the 85 page guide to some of the best conifers, which provides more gorgeous photos and brief descriptions of habit, growth rates, etc. This book really helps make conifers seem like a much more usable design element in planning my garden, and makes me more comfortable with experimenting with them. While I wish there were more photos and/or plans of moderate-sized suburban-type lots that would help disseminate this beauty to the masses, this is a wonderful book as is and a tremendous value too.

I'm an experienced gardener without much experience with conifers, but this book is perfect for my needs. First, the photography is excellent. Almost every one of the 182 pages of text includes excellent color photography. There is an nice balance of close-up, step-by-step instructions, with great landscape shots. All of the photos appear to be the original works of Adrian and Richard Bloom, most all including genus, species, and cultivar PLUS age of speciman in photograph (which could not be done without being in the garden). This may be the most "labor intensive" gardening book on any subject I have ever examined. For the collector, there is thorough alphabetical listing by genus forming the heart of the book (over 80 pages). If you're not an experienced conifer grower, you could begin to act like one after immersing yourself in the deep experiences shared by the authors here.