Flowers A to Z: Buying, Growing, Cutting, Arranging - A Beautiful Reference Guide to Selecting and Caring for the Best from Florist and Garden

by Cecelia Heffernan

A guide to buying, cultivating, caring for, cutting, and arranging flowers with information on flower varieties, vase life, color, and scent.

Genres: Gardening

160 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2005

Reviews

[Liz]

This book is largely huge, glossy, gorgeous photographs - it's a very quick read. Despite the title, it is not really exactly a guide to flowers A to Z (though there are flowers whose names start with A and with Z) but rather to some of the major cut flowers. However, both as a long-time consumer of and home-garden grower of cut flowers, I think that the tips for these flowers are pretty good ones. She also includes some general tips for arranging and extending the life of cut flowers so that you can apply the book to flowers that aren't included in it.

The biggest thing that keeps me from giving this more stars is a flaw that seems so obvious to me - she rarely includes the specific species or cultivar for any of the flowers in the gorgeous photos; the reader is left to figure that out on their own. I suspect she was approaching the subject as a florist, not a gardener; many florists use what they are given, but a gardener would choose what they want to grow, based partially on what they like and partially on what would fit in with the rest of their garden. To figure out which of the glossy photos I'm going to grow in my own garden, I'm going to have to do research beyond the extent of this book, which is really a shame. While this book is beautiful and useful, it could have been even more so if only for the inclusion of extremely brief captions.

[Serena]

Pretty good. The best cut flower ref. guide I found was by Gilly Love. It's out of print now - I got my copy on ebay.