The Natural Shade Garden

As a young landscape designer, I simply breathed this book and it gave me an undying love of shade gardening, as well as a deeper understanding of many of the genera that grow well in shade.

That said, in order to enjoy the book you need to be comfy with botanical/ latin names, have a passing familiarity with many plants, and understand some basic design and planting principles.

The book has delicious photos, though nowadays most garden books would be published with more of them, and is really inspiring if you have a shady plot and don't know how to get year-round interest out of it.

I hope this book is republished and updated with fresh new photos, new plants, and new commentary. It was super-cool when it first came out and now is just a solid, good book, but not totally outstanding compared to other modern gardening books because of the layout of the text and the number and quality of the photos.

I don't think there is any one perfect gardening book, which is probably why I have 50. I bought this book for a friend who has a very shady yard in the Mid-Atlantic area, so most of these plants work great for her. In Texas where I am, not so much. I wanted great photographs, a wide variety of plants with color and a lot of different ideas on how to landscape a shady yard. I got all this and more and my friend is very happy with the book. We both like this book very much and recommend it highly to gardeners with acid soil and a reasonable amount of rain. North Central Texas where it has been over 100 degrees for a week and the soil is alkaline concrete -- this is not the book for you.

I have a shady garden and bought this book expecting some good information as well as inspiration.
I must say the photos are all indeed beautiful and pretty inspiring. But this is not a book you would consult for gardening information. For example, it doesn't even tell you the hardiness zones for the plants cited. I for one, am glad I knew that Hostas will not grow in California, but I'm pretty sure a lot of beginners out there will get excited on plants they can't even grow.
I would say this is an absolutely beautiful "coffee table book", but not really a "gardening book".

If you like pretty pictures, then this book is for you. I bought it in conjunction with "The Complete Shade Gardener", which is black and white, to be a sort of color companion. The section of the book titled Plants and Plantings goes through the author's favorite plants for shade (which very well may be all of them) and gives a text description that does very little to give you any real understanding of the plant-not what it looks like, or how to grow it. Perhaps worst of all, the pictures in this section don't seem to correspond to the text of what the author is describing at all, so you are forced to thumb ahead or behind to see a picture of the plant the author is talking about at the time. This makes it very hard to read as you are always thumbing through the pages to find a picture of the flower the author is talking about.

The first 60 pages deal with inspiration and design, and are much easier to understand, as well as being laid out better than the next 100. The last part of the book, which presents individual garden examples also seems to be better organized and well written, although I haven't read it through yet.

Since about 2/5 of this book was enjoyable, I am giving it 2 stars. The middle section has all the monotony of a plant encyclopedia with half the information, and none of the organization. The strengths of the book stand out as the beautifully photographed plates, and the pleasant tone of the author, which still manages to be witty and friendly even during the monotonous middle section.

We have a shady, sloped yard in Texas which is highly unusual for this part of Texas. This means we usually can't grow many of the plants that most people in our community do. So, my husband and I went to the bookstore and found this book. There were others on shade gardening, but this had the best photography. The publisher obviously used high-quality printing techniques on this book to get the vivid color. So, this makes just a beautiful book to look at. I used to feel a little disappointed that our yard was so shaded (except that it's cooler in the hot Texas sun than others!), but when I saw this book I realized we could make it into quite a gem.

I will admit that I am a novice gardener, but I found this book inspiring with lots of ideas for plants that we could use in the shade. I am not sorry that I spent $40 on this book!