Price : $12.00

Product Description

Just as stylish accessories bring a room to life, gorgeous planted containers are the finishing touch for every garden home. With this book, Americas favorite gardener, P. Allen Smith, shows how to create a beautiful container garden in a matter of minutes, in an innovative recipe-style format complete with ingredients lists, step-by-step planting instructions, and advice on how to effectively display these colorful accents.

Beautiful and versatile, these container designs are the perfect solution for decks, porches, balconies, and gardens that need a focal point or a splash of color. Each container recipe fulfills one of the 12 Principles of Design that Allen established in his first bestselling book, P. Allen Smiths Garden Home. As a result, the container will wonderfully frame the view from a window, offer a welcoming reception in an entryway, help to establish a sense of rhythm along a walkway, or extend your homes color and dcor into the garden. Allen shares the secrets he uses to make his eye-catching arrangements, as well as special planting and display tips for placement in your garden. The designs range from sophisticated to casual, yet the instructions are so easy to follow that you can assemble these containers in no time at alleven with little or no gardening experience. There are recipes for every season of the year, to ensure that you can enjoy lush container gardens year-round.

A special resource section includes a complete plant directory, tips on how to select the right container to complement your gardens style, grooming and plant-care guidelines, and basic instructions for planting pots, window boxes, and hanging baskets. Lavishly illustrated with more than 150 photographs, this book is sure to inspire seasoned gardeners as well as beginners interested in enhancing the beauty of their Garden Home with P. Allen Smiths signature container designs.

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-01-27
This book has the best "recipes" for containers I have seen. They are made from easy to get plants. You can see how to change color schemes. They are intended to look finished and full right away, but once again, changing the number of plants to allow time for the container to grow into a full look is easy to figure out. Advice is very practical. You don’t have to buy unusual or very expensive plants to get a great look with this book.

Review date : 2007-07-04
My husband and I bought this book after seeing it at my brothers and love everything about it. You don’t have to be a designer to make beautiful arrangements.

Review date : 2006-01-21
The front section of the book, with its glossy format, is a visual treat. The latter portion, with its faded photographs and mossy contrasts in typeset and paper color made me wonder if I had received a misprinted copy of the book. Not only will the planted containers need good light, I’ll need it to read about how to put them together!

Review date : 2005-12-17
What’s not to like about P.Allen Smith’s approach to gardening? A favorite of Public Television fans, and the fellow who pops up on the Weather channel, Smith is a font of information for the new home gardener. In his nifty new book CONTAINER GARDENS he shows once again that he has many answers to questions the novice might have about a particular topic. Smith follows the seasons of the year discussing what you might display when spring arrives (bulbs and other spring flowers), summer heat bakes everything (some plants like it hot), fall colors the garden, and winter deposits snow and icicles. I must confess, I generally empty most of my pots when late fall arrives as few are frost proof, but I have purchased some containers in recent years that can weather the coldest temperatures and their contents survive freezing. Smith discusses the pots and pot materials you can use to defy temperature extremes be they hot or cold.

Smith suggests winter is the time when the garden is most subtle with its barks, berries and winter blooms, and last year I prepared a few winter containers using ideas he describes in this book. For one thing, pansies seem to be able to stand cold weather and often on a mild winter day their cheerful little faces pop through the snow to greet you. Some bulbs like Galanthus (snow drops) and Scilla will bloom early and give you a hint of the nice weather to come. Hellebores (and Crocus in my Virginia garden) are famous for their winter appearance, as noted in the Christmas carol "Lo a Rose Er Blooming" and small evergreen plants such as miniature hollies and needled trees also can be used to great effect. You can also try your hand at indoor pots. If you work outdoors, the key is to use a weatherproof container so the contents don’t freeze and crack the sides of the pot. Smith’s book is a great book for beginners and those of us who have been gardening a while.

Review date : 2005-12-08
P. Allen Smith’s Container Gardens: 60 container recipes to accent your garden
Clarkson Potter
ISBN 1-4000-5343-9

Yes, you do get in this book 60 reasonably practical container recipes, each complete with a large colour photograph (plants clearly labelled), a diagram of the planted container and list of plants required. There is also some accompanying text which you can skip; it adds very little to your understanding of the recipe.
About three quarters of the book is devoted to two-page, full-colour glossy presentations of each container design, presented by season throughout the year.
The remainder of the book is information about potting sheds, plant care and a plant directory. This section is not glossy, not in full colour, and does not relate visually to the rest of the book. In fact the illustrations and much of the text is hidden behind a muddy yellow wash that made me wonder if my eyes were playing tricks on me. I don’t know what the book designer/art director was smoking but the result is horrible.
What you have here is a large format, coffee table book with a photo of a cute young guy (shirt open) on the front. If you need yet another book about container gardening, or if you like to have a picture of a cute young guy gazing dreamily up at you from your coffee table, then by all means buy this book.