The Green Tapestry: Choosing and Grouping the Best Perennial Plants for Your Garden

by Beth Chatto

Using her own garden as a framework, the author discusses principles of garden design and maintenance and offers cultivation and zoning information on a variety of plants.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1989

Reviews

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beth Chatto is a highly respected plantswoman, as both designer and plant ecologist. This book focuses on her own garden, which has many different zones with differences in soil type, sun/shade exposure, degree of moisture available, etc., and shows us how she has planted the areas. Her philosophy of planting is to observe what conditions your garden has (and, like her, you may have more than one type of area) and select plants that like those conditions. In quest of this information, she has spent time looking up where original species came from. Don’t think because she is planting to suit the site that her plantings are boring; she has used many plants that are less common. The area of England that she lives in is drier and colder than most of Great Britain, so her conditions are more like the USA. Five stars for solid information.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is useful and contains good information but it probably could have been shortened to roughly 40 pages with associated diagrams rather than this whole to-do.