The Adventurous Gardener

Like other Christopher Lloyd books, The Adventurous Gardener is a pleasure to read for any gardener. He has any number of tips for making cuttings, pruning shrubs and trees, foundation planting, color combinations and other subjects fascinating to gardeners. This book is directed to those who garden for pleasure--and both experienced and novice gardeners will learn something from it. Negatives: He writes for the British climate which is milder than most of the USA, so gardeners here must take that into account. A good plant guide will help a great deal, to look up plants he mentions (the black and white illustrations aren't particularly useful) and to see whether they'll grow in your area. He also has an enormous yard, seemingly unlimited time, large greenhouses of his own, and people who help him garden. Nonetheless, this is a wonderful book I've gotten lots of ideas from--and it's always fun to read again. I can't give it less than give stars; as the previous reviewer said, I can't judge it for not being something it wasn't intended to be. I will judge it by Lloyd's intentions, great ideas and techniques, and the joy I had in reading it.

The Adventurous Gardener provides a brilliant gardener's take on any number of practical, as well as aesthetic, judgments. The first 11 chapters concern maintenance and propagation, such as "Unusual Ways with Rose Cuttings," "Maintaining Mature Hedging," and "Some Reactions to Cutting Back" (which covers the results of radical pruning on scores of genuses of shrubs and trees). The next 8 chapters cover trees and shrubs, Lloyd's experience and opinions of hundreds of species and cultivars, and the best ways, culturally and aesthetically, to use them in the garden. The rest of the book covers a variety of herbaceous plants, design concepts, the theories of Gertrude Jekyll, "Planning a Border," you name it. Of course, the book, at 250 pages, is not comprehensive. For that matter, Lloyd's "The Well-Tempered Garden" is in a sense basically the same book, except that there is very little overlap. Each is a series of essays which stands on its own. (Similarly, the estate of the late Henry Mitchell has 3 such books out, made up of his newspaper gardening columns; but Mitchell's columns are shorter, more about literary style than detail, and his 3 books overlap each other considerably.) This book's greatest weakness: it only has 18 low-resolution black & white photos. These are in the book's center, and do little to illustrate the text. So in order to follow many of the chapters, which concern specific varieties of, say, crabapple trees, or concern combinations of plants, you will have to have the "A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants" or a similar reference at hand. That said, this keeps the book small and dirt cheap. I suppose I could, for lack of hundreds of glossy color photos, rate the book less than the perfect 5 stars, but I can't see criticizing a book for not being what it is not, especially when it is so good at being what it is.