Landscaping With Tropical Plants

Great informative book.

This book give you lots of ideas of planting and choosing what tropical plants suit your garden- lots of information and picture

Book was everything I expected

OK

So many plants that I would love to have, all the things my dreams consist of plant and garden wise

Excellent

Great book with different species to the norm

Big leaves for exotic effect is a better book then this one for make tropical gardens in the UK. This book focuses really on plants only suitable for southern USA gardens and indoor plants. The above mentioned book is much better.

Good one

While looking for a book on tropical or tropical looking plants for a temperat garden i found this book to be very helpful. I actually bought three books, Hot Plants for Cool Climates, Paradise Found and this book. I think this is the best of the three. This book has many pictures of landscapes and various plant combinations, all plants are named in the picture, which i find helpful. The book has many helpful areas, lists of tropicals with fabulous flowers, tropicals with colourful foliage, vines, small-leafed tropicals for contrast, houseplants that thrive outdoors. How to look after in winter, summer maintenance. The back area of the book spotlights many tropical looking plants with pictures and information. This will become one of my favourite books

Glossy presentation helps appreciate landscaping with tropical and subtropical plants. Typical of Sunset publications. Good for the beginner with probably a few good hints for the more experienced. I appreciated the importance of proper soil preparation and the recipe for it. Classification of different types of plants, their visual effects, and suggestions about choices also very helpful. Listing of nurseries specializing in tropical plants especially useful. Use of these types of plants requires dedication on the part of the planter with regard to cost, time commitment and also ability to accept the risk of failure in cold climates. Success therefore is all the more rewarding.

My husband and I decided to re-landscape and have been searching all over for a goo reference book for tropical plants. This is even better than I expected. It gives tips on garden types; it has a map in the back that breaks the planting zones down to a miniscule level and will reference it through the book. The back half lists different varieties of tropical plants, where they grow best and tips on how to grow, protect, and overwinter them. It has been a huge help in our planning!

From the other reviews I read, I was under the impression that this book would be a book focused primarily on design ideas for non-tropical zones, with lots of pictures of tropical gardens. However, I was very surprised to find that is not the case. Primarily the design information in the book was about basic principles of garden design, without much in the way of specifics: I counted only 2 practical garden plans with a specific layout for plants in the whole book, and one was a design for laying out your houseplants outside around a bench. Its padded with a lot of basic information (the ubiquitous color wheel, how to prepare soil for your garden, why water features are great in gardens, etc) without a lot of tropical specific information for design. The good side of the book is that it has lots of information on how to propagate and winterize exotic tropicals, which is great to have. If not for this, I would have been very disappointed in the book, however that alone makes the book worth considering. I will keep looking for a more practical guide for designing with tropical plants ( I am new to gardening, and I prefer concrete examples that I can build off of, like in Perennial Combinations by C. Colston Burrell), but I am glad to have the book for the information it does provide for propagation and winterizing.