Passionate Gardening: Good Advice for Challenging Climates

Passionate Gardening, specifically the photos and text contributed by Lauren Springer, is the best single source of inspiration for gardeners in the Rocky Mountain states. Though Lauren's solo work, Undaunted Garden, is perhaps more comprehensive and detailed, Passionate Gardening has dazzling photos of her current garden and is a blueprint for a spectacular success in difficult climates.I own a nursery and I am a garden designer. I see many projects that are appropriate for xeric or rock garden applications. Whenever I show the customer Passionate Gardening, the response is universally, "I want to make my garden as beautiful as that one." Lauren introduces us to plants that are hardly household names (yet), and teaches us specifically, practically and clearly how to use them. Lonicera korolkowiii 'Floribunda'may not be known to you, but you will have no doubt how to use it when you finish this book. And since that is one of the few blue leaved deciduous shrubs, you may very well have the perfect place for it in your landscape. There is no better read than her books for those of us in cold and dry climates, and even a southern Florida subtropical gardener could glean important ideas about approaching design and color/texture combinations. Enjoy!

A gardening book which can be read on many levels. There is an incredible amount of information, but it can be digested in manageable bites. Short essays on many subjects. But. . best of all, the book gives you hope that you, too, can create and maintain a wonderful, yet personal garden. This one spent the winter on my night stand!

This book contains short, well written and inspirational gardening essays. The brevity of the essays makes it easy to pick up and read a section whenever you have a few extra minutes. 'Tho it is written more for a western audience, the passion for gardening, good advice, and beauty of the book is transferrable to any region. I appreciated Lauren Springer's more relaxed emphasis on gardening, and got some smiles from Rob Proctors's humor: On slugs: "I gave up saucers of beer [for slug control] fearing that slugs from miles around would spread the word that I threw a nightly kegger." On variegated leaves: "It's been creeping up on me, over the years, like crow's feet and love handles. At first I was in denial but it's time to face facts: I've succumbed to variegated madness." On vines: "Some gardeners look upon vines with distrust; perhaps their twining, creeping, twisting ways unleash something subconscious, something Freudian." On advice: "There's not much point in saying 'Holy cow, that Artemisia 'Valerie Finnis' has choked out half your herb garden,' when the gardener is painfully aware of the problem. It's all in the approach: a better one might be, 'Can I lend you a goat?'" On learning Latin names: "One shy exchange student from Switzerland had finally come up with the nerve to identify a particular pine he recognized: 'Pinus rigida,' he said confidently, with a completely different pronunciation of the first word than any of us Americans had heard except in human-anatomy class."

While I agree that specifics in the book are geared for western climates, the ideas and humor will appeal to most gardeners. Don't buy it as a "how-to" book, there are plenty of those around. Buy it for inspiration a la (the late)Henry Mitchell and Anne Lovejoy. The book has excellent examples of unusual color palettes for the gardener ready to venture beyond "pink, blue and white".

Excellent advice for the western gardiner, especially those of us used to conditions in the midwest and learning to work with the challenging (and rewarding) climate of the high plains!