| | |  | Gardening & Horticulture | Home » » » » The Ever-Blooming Flower Garden: A Blueprint for Continuous Color | | | | | | | Description: | | The gardener's fantasy of colorful blooms that begin in early spring and continue through the last glow of fall is now an achievable reality. With a little careful planning and the fun-to-use formulas in The Ever-Blooming Flower Garden, season-spanning spectacular color is more attainable than ever before.
Author Lee Schneller developed her blueprint system when she began designing gardens professionally, and she has successfully applied it to more than 150 gardens. Now she brings her proven system to gardeners everywhere who continue to chase that elusive dream of perpetual bloom.
Schneller's system is a wonder of organization and information - packed with checklists and questionnaires, planning equations and plant characteristics. Yet for all its wealth of information, gardeners of every level will find Schneller's techniques simple to use and her blueprints fun to customize. Readers choose from a list of 220 low-maintenance plants organized by bloom month and supported by a Flower Catalog with basic growing information and photos of all 220 plants.
By following five simple steps, readers develop a unique garden design featuring personally chosen plants that deliver height, color, and tons of blooms all season long. For added convenience, the completed planning chart also serves as a plant shopping list.
Once the blueprint has been created, Schneller helps readers put the plan to work, offering advice on shopping, planting, and finally, enjoying and maintaining the garden.
Praise for the book:"The book lives up to its title: It is a blueprint for continuous color in the garden (at least from early spring to fall). There is instruction on mapping it all out on a grid -- and also instructions for those who don't want to put pen to paper. Don't be daunted; I'm not a mathematical person, but it makes sense to me. Lee Schneller, who has designed and built more than 150 gardens in Maine since 1995, takes you through the five steps to continuous color, including grabbing graph paper and a pen and checking out the plant palette and flower catalog in the back of the book. I particularly liked the flower catalog, which lists more than 200 trusty perennials selected for, among other things, their hardiness, attractive flowers and foliage, and long bloom time. The flower catalog provides the bloom period of each in a useful, graphical way. My only wish is that Schneller would publish a follow-up flower catalog for those who want more." -Ann Robinson, oregonlive.com 05/06/09
"If you, like me, love color in the garden, both for admiring and cutting, you'll pick up The Ever-Blooming Flower Garden. The book lives up to its title: it IS a blue print for continuous color in the garden." - New York Newsday
"The book is divided into five parts, which follow a logical path to allow any homeowner with some basic growing skills to create an attractive continuously blooming flower garden."
-- Portland Press Herald, 7/14/09 | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Lee Schneller | | Paperback:
| 217 pages | | Publisher:
| Storey Publishing, LLC | | Publication Date:
| March 11, 2009 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1603421394 | | Product Length:
| 8.96 inches | | Product Width:
| 7.9 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.52 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.23 pounds | | Package Length:
| 8.9 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.9 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.7 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.35 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 27 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 27 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
37 of 38 found the following review helpful:
 Most useful gardening book I've ever boughtApr 04, 2009
By Wynne
I've been a gardener for many years, yet missed many of the points that Lee makes in this wonderful new practical guide to planning your flower gardens. For example, many times I've see on a plant tag that the height is 24 inches, but didn't realize until the end of the first year that I'd put it in the wrong spot because its foliage is a mere 3 inches all season, with an eventual spindly flower spike that may get to 24 inches, but the plant as a whole belong in the front of the garden. Lee categorizes the plants not just by height but by shape, so you grasp how the plant is likely to fill the spot.
She has carefully selected about 200 plants and organized them by blooming time, color and height to make it easy to pick what will work for your space. Then each plant has a picture and writeup, including how to pronounce the name (thank you!) that gives comfortable advice from her considerable experience. For example "Be prepared to pull out seedlings all over the place, but it's worth it for this purple-foliaged, nicely textured plant. Can easily engulf its neighbors if not kept in check." (p149)
She dedicates preliminary chapters to useful advise on making a garden work. "If you want to minimize maintenance, try to choose plants that look good even when they've gone by. For example...white astilbes go through an ugly brownish white phase before developing relatively attractive seed heads. In fact, white flowers generally die badly and go through an unfortunate phase." (p33) "Successful perennial design isn't all about flowers. Starting with a framework of plants whose foliage looks great all season long is probably the single best way to create a good perennial bed." (p36)
There are five sample gardens where she illustrates the steps for planning and executing the garden, with pictures to inspire you. The book is full of pictures, and my only regret is the lack of pictures at the end where she talks about plants for special conditions. None of these made it into the favored group because of one problem or another, but some sounded intriguing and I would have liked a picture of each.
The book ends with list of recommended plants for special needs "Will grow in heavy clay soil," "Deer Resistant," etc. and a comprehensive index and list of resources.
Whether you are a beginner or more experienced, this book will help you plan and maintain beautiful gardens. I wish it had come into my life a long time ago, it would have saved me from a lot of mistakes.
10 of 10 found the following review helpful:
The Perfect Book for Artistic, Practical GardensApr 11, 2009
By Alice Gorman
There are many beautiful, artistic gardening books that have little practical value. There are an equal number of practical books that are not aesthetically exciting. Lee Schneller's "The Ever-Blooming Flower Garden" is the perfect combination.It not only tells you what to plant that will create the effect you want, when you want it, but it also tells you what not to plant and why. The charts and illustrations are extremely helpful in visualizing what she recommends.Her knowledge is based on her years of study in Japan and her practical design and planting and experience in the state of Maine.Underlying all of that is a deep love and respect for nature.It all comes through to the reader in this book.
10 of 10 found the following review helpful:
Recommended without reservationApr 06, 2009
By Barbara Butler
I love this book! I have a bookcase full of gardening books that I enjoyed reading but were really not particularly helpful in the actual execution. That is where this book is seriously different - the author knows her subject well, but, perhaps more importantly, understands her readers equally well. A section I particularly like is where she talks about plants that she calls "proven losers" and "disappoinntments." She tells the reader what her experience was with these plants, which I found to be really helpful. I found myself nodding in agreement with some of her assessments and not feeling like it was just my own deficits as a gardener.
I also really appreciate the practical advice on planting a dense garden - cuts down on weeds and the need to divide as often.
The author's personaility shines throughout the book - her lack of pretension and honesty make for fun reading. I recommend this book without reservation, and will be buying it as gifts for my gardening and aspiring gardening friends and family.
19 of 22 found the following review helpful:
 Good Book - but biased for the Northern StatesApr 21, 2009
By RSB
The ideas presented in this book are novel in many ways and I think it is a good read for any person interested in design. However, if you live in Zone 8 then half of the suggested plants will be unusable for you and over half of the book is dedicated to plant suggestions. If you live in zone 9 or lower then this entire book, except for the first 15 pages, is entirely useless. There should be a warning that the author is from Maine and has no experience in gardening anywhere but Maine. With that said the book still has some value and I did enjoy it (you can read it in about 30 min).
8 of 8 found the following review helpful:
What a book!Jul 27, 2009
By Loraine
This has to be one of the most informative, well thought out, and easy to understand gardening books that I have ever read. It helps you design your garden, figures the number of plants per area, shows color combinations, has worksheets with which to work, lists her all time favorite plants, gives detail descriptions of about 200 plants and helps you to achieve three seasons of both flowers and foliage by using worksheets and graphs. You can't fail as a gardener if you follow this book. It truly is an amazing book. I own many, many gardening books, and this is about as informative and easy to read (and apply the knowledge)as I've ever seen. This is a perfect gift for the new or experienced gardener.
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