Organic Flower Gardening

As you make your way through the pages of ORGANIC FLOWER GARDENING, you'll discover that this book is more than just a gardener's guide to beautiful blooms. It's a unique flower book because, in addition to all the gardening and flower basics, it explains the marvelous interplay in nature that makes for an attractive and healthy garden. ORGANIC FLOWER GARDENING discusses the significance of mulches and marigolds, compost and camomile, ladybugs and lacewings. It explains the intermingling of flowers with one another, with other plants, with the life in the soil and in the branches of trees. It shows how to create and maintain a garden that is lovely and harmonious, lovely and bird attracting, lovely and pest repellent, all at once! Informative, yet distinctively personal, Foster explains how to enhance outdoor space with flowering plants of all sorts--annuals, perennials, biennials, bulbs, roses, and flowering shrubs, trees, and ground covers--as she shares with readers her own favorites and relates her experiences growing and enjoying them. She gives guidelines for choosing ornamentals and planning gardens for color almost the year round. For those who want organic gardening basics, she provides explanations of good soil and how to get it, disease and pest protection and how to provide it, compost and how to make it. Foster spells out other gardening techniques with reminders throughout that an understanding and respect for living things is a important to good garden housekeeping as a practical knowledge of what to do. In the special garden section, Foster shows how to bring out the best of untamed, natural forms by creating inviting rock, shade, water, and seaside gardens. She discusses the intricasies of wildflower gardening and explains how to select, propagate, and provide the special conditions in which these wild beauties thrive. Also included are many detailed lists, describing various plants and their attributes.