Ken Druse's Natural Garden Guides:
Award-winning gardening expert Ken Druse offers a personal selection of 80 ideal plants for the natural gardener, drawn from his best-selling classic The Natural Shade Garden.

This companion guide is illustrated throughout with 130 of Druse's spectacular color photo-graphs. All-new descriptions discuss the origins of each plant, supply the pronunciation of their Latin names, and offer information on their ultimate size, time of bloom, light and soil requirements, cold hardiness, and special interest, such as colorful berries or butterfly attraction.

Here, too, is indispensable advice for using these plants with companions to create striking designs. Each section has an original introduction presenting valuable techniques for making your own natural garden. An appendix gives mail-order sources.

In 80 Great Natural Shade Garden Plants Ken Druse selects the best plants for natural gardening in the shade: Ornamental Shrubs  ¸  Perennials for Flowers  ¸  Perennials for Foliage  ¸  Ground Covers and Vines  ¸  The Best Hostas  ¸  The Best Ferns

Shade can be a gardener's curse or delight, depending on how it's managed. Even a heavy grove of mature trees needn't have bare ground beneath; they can be surrounded with any number of shade-loving foliage, grasses, or grasslike ground covers, including galax, dichondra, ivy, vinca, wintergreen, maidenhair fern... the list of possibilities is a long one. Druse himself gardens in the shadow of a Brooklyn brownstone, so his advice is by no means limited to gardeners with woodland acreage. This book also successfully punctures the myth that a shady flower garden must be colored in greens and subtle pastels: a parade of brilliant camellias, columbines, clematis, and primula proves that a shade gardener's crayon box is as varied as any, and the well-organized Druse sorts the herbaceous perennials by color in an addendum at the back of the book.