Price : $13.99

Product Description

Tough Plants for Southern Gardens is for Southern gardeners who want low care, no care, tried and true plants for their gardens. This is the book for gardeners who want plants they can plant and forget!

Tough Plants for Southern Gardens is written for novice and accomplished gardeners alike, for all gardeners who value their leisure time. They also value the appearance of their home and appreciate the benefits of well-placed landscapinghowever; they do not want to devote too much time to keeping it beautiful.

Tough Plants for Southern Gardens includes 120 of the toughest plants for Southern gardens, including annuals, bulbs, perennials, shrubs and small trees, ornamental vines, and lawns. Each featured plant is noted for its ability to thrive with minimal care. Many of the selections can withstand drought, poor soils, and minimal (or no) pruning, while providing beauty and charm in the home landscape.

Each selection provides specific information on the plant’s use in the landscape, mature size, flowering characteristics (if applicable), varieties, soil preference, and propagation. Each chapter also contains informative essays covering topics such as: companion planting tips, pest avoidance, and handling invasive plants.

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-09-25
Great Book! Felder Rushing has a way of sharing information in a way that is funny(sometimes) and interesting as well as informative. A great sequel to Passalong Plants which he co-authored with Steve Bender. A must have for the southern gardener.

Review date : 2008-09-07
As a former yankee, I’ve struggled with southern gardening for the past ten years. This book is a terrific compilation of facts, lists, advice, pictures and humor. An easy and fun read that encourages you to write comments in the margins then gets you out the door and into the garden!

Review date : 2008-08-01
Must have guide for those who do not want to wade through endless books that are much to technical for the average home gardner–novice or seasoned–helps to take the dreary out of selection.

Review date : 2008-06-26
Rushing’s homey, humorous approach is pleasant reading and the advice is sheer gold. I have planted a number of the plants he recommends, and every one of them is flourishing brilliantly. His advice is nicely targeted; by breaking the south into upper, middle, and lower zones and by describing each individual plant’s tolerances for sun and water, he allows readers from Virginia to Florida to Texas to all find just what they need in it. It’s a great shove in the right direction for novice and experienced gardeners alike, as well: stop pampering fragile unadapted divas you picked up at the garden center and start making the plant’s suitability to your area the first step. Look to other gardeners and local growth first, and discover the beauties that lie within it.

Don’t panic, though – Rushing really knows his plants! You won’t find yourself trapped in a yucca-and-aloe nightmare or confined to a dogmatically barren xeriscape. His book’s excellent photos and descriptions present readers with a wide variety of beautiful plants with many different looks and qualities. Thanks to Rushing, I have a delightful little English-style cottage garden in northeast Texas, soft, pretty, and delicate-looking as you could ask, and not a single plant of it requires more care than the automatic sprinklers give the lawn once a week. And did I mention that my lawn looks better too? He’s that good!

His advice on how to prepare plants and soil for transplant is golden as well. As I read, I recognized so many of my own worst mistakes in the past, and I learned how to give my new plants a much better introduction to my garden. Rushing always aims to balance effort and results, and offers a tantalizing new perspective on gardening: the more you pamper, the more you teach the plant to require pampering. Pick tough plants, do less to them, and teach them to fend for themselves. They do!

There are one or two things I wish I could add to this book. An index by light/water requirements would be one; the book is arranged by types of plants (shrub, tree, vine, etc.), and that is very good at communicating the necessity for planning a garden’s structure in layers, but not very quick for finding, say, what plant would grow best in a specific location. Rushing is pretty good at identifying potentially invasive plants, but he recommends at least one – "air potato" vine – that I believe is illegal to plant in Florida. The other thing I did have to watch was the question of toxicity. He doesn’t address this with most plants, and so I did end up tearing the sweet peas out when I learned that one of the symptoms of ingestion was permanent paralysis. If you’ve got pets or small children using the yard, do Google up some of the many excellent plant toxicity guides out there and check carefully to avoid a tragedy. And do buy this excellent book, because it’s a gem!

Review date : 2008-05-03
I saw this book at a local bookstore but waited for the savings at Amazon. It has wonderful photos and discriptions. In fact I can’t keep it at home much because my friends keep borrowing it! It contains tried and true southern garden plants my mom and grandmother had plus some surprises I never thought of before. I would highly recommend this book!