Natural Companions: The Garden Lover's Guide to Plant Combinations

This book is so dense with gorgeous photography it will take your breath away. The way she arranges the flowers on a solid background makes it look like a painting or at the very least--a beautiful botanical illustration. All printed on heavy glossy stock.

I could not have afforded this book if I hadn’t found it used/in good condition, but BOY. It has very high-quality production. I feel lucky. It is both a coffee table book with well-executed photo reproductions of cleverly styled specimen as well as food for thought about a garden, both through the seasons and the months.A challenge of a garden composition is finding what blooms for YOU in what week and where. There are so many variables to our sight’s exposures and soils and what we have for elevations...it’s a great pass time to imagine all the ways one might achieve a balanced aesthetic at any given specific week in the year.This book is fodor.

Ken Druse always tells you interesting and surprising things about plants, and his photographs are a guarantee you'll have a very beautiful book. No one can match his combination of lively, intelligent writing and great horticultural photography. So I ordered Natural Companions as soon as I learned about it. The book explains how to combine flowers, leaves, stems, etc. to get the best effects in your garden. A very special treat here would be the many amazing displays of cut flowers and foliage beautifully arranged and scanned (it's hard to believe how gorgeous and fresh they look!) by his collaborator, Ellen Hoverkamp, which are included along with Druse's in situ garden shots. The book is loaded with ideas you can use to make your own creative displays. It has many short sections, grouped by broad topic, that explain a wide range of factors you can consider in planning a garden, and I think you'll want to dip into it again and again. It would make a great gift for a gardener, or for that matter, for anyone who appreciates nature's beauty.

I ordered "Natural Companions"from Amazon the moment I heard it was available. Garden books by Ken Druse are not to be missed. The moment my copy arrived, I opened the box, looked inside and gasped! This is a breathtakingly beautiful "garden book." Now that I've begun reading it, I can say it's full of valuable information, too. And plenty of Ken's humor! Ellen Hoverkamp's dramatic, lifelike photographs have such impact, I fall in love with plants all over again. Most of the photos are composites of many flowers, helpfully accompanied by a identification key. Since the book is divided into many subjects, it works well to read just a few pages at a time--take a break to digest -- then move on. Savor it: this book is a treasure.

Lovely book with beautiful photographs. Very useful for new gardeners - like myself - who are still putting flower 'faces' with names. Text covers general gardening knowledge - again, quite helpful for beginners but I'm uncertain on the utility for long-time gardeners. My one disappointment is the strong geographic bias: it's very focused on East Coast gardens and plants with less than five examples from the West Coast. I can apply the principles, but none of the specifics, to my coastal Southern California garden.

I am a flower painter and this book "Natural Companions: The Garden Lover's Guide" is a magnificent large format book by Ken Druse. The flowers are artfully arranged and beautifully photographed by Ellen Havercamp on a dark background. The photographs are designed in clusters of a wide variety of flowers, some similar, some widely different in a botanical style and will serve as a beautiful book to treasure for any avid flower lover or artist as I am and will serve as a wonderful reference. It was reasonably priced on Amazon and I highly recommend it.

Bought this book at BandN and returned because Amazon is a much better deal. This book is gorgeous! I actually purchased it when I was looking for artist reference books to help me with adult coloring. Besides the beautiful photos and excellent quality of the paper, the photo compositions are awesome. The fact that the photos are composed in groupings of flowers and leafs is a plus because it helps me choose a color scheme as well.

There are lots of books that show you combinations of plants to make your garden more interesting and beautiful. This book provides wonderful information in such a different way. Truly eye candy. The larger size of the book does justice to the images of plants on the dark scanned background, arranged artfully. I like that there are different themes for the photo compositions. The "Families" chapter lets you visually compare similar plants. The "Color" themed plates are helpful and provide food for thought in your own arrangements. I love the concept and the execution. Well worth the price!

I purchased this book based only on the botanical art in there which I'm happy to report are on almost every single turn of each page. Glorious & precious book with superb photography of inspirational & very creative flora and fauna arrangement.. A lot of the smaller photographs - which can only be described as "visual botanical poetry", had a somewhat unconventional way of expression, so refreshing that I wished they were larger. Well done!

It's a beautiful book. Photographs are exquisite, mostly of 'decapitated' and detached parts of different plants that are botanically or thematically closely related (ferns, conifers, hydrangeas, climbers, variegation, colour schemes, fragrance, literary themes - mentioned in Shakespeare, leaf shapes).These are studio photos, tastefully arranged and beautifully presented on full-page displays. They are not photos of actual living plants, in situ, in gardens. Very beautiful but absolutely of no practical use for gardening. The plants are grouped together in chapters with clever titles ('Amber Waves' - ornamental grasses, 'True to Type' - lilies, 'Circle of Light' - colour theory starting with Newton, 'Roundabout' - circular and spherical shapes of flowers). Very much without regard to how the plants are combined in the garden.For instance, the chapter 'In the Hood' (pp. 66-67) is about the Araceae, Arisaema being familiar to many gardeners. Taro (Colocasia esculenta) is mentioned. 'Natural companions', of what? The one-page text, page 66, says nothing about that, interesting botanical or ethnological tidbits, notwithstanding. Page 67 is a full-page of detached parts from different members of Araceae. On page 66 there's a small picture of a branch of red maple and skunk cabbage. A catchy title, but this chapter tells me nothing informative, that which is useful in the garden at all.There are photos of live plants actually in gardens - some are double-spread or small ones, but they are impressionistic (as in impressionism of Arts) images or isolated specimens. I was looking for practical information how to combine plants in the garden. But this book is not about that, it's not about gardening. I was mistaken about the intent of the author, basing on the author's previous books.The book is an anthology of Ken Druse's musings or essays about plants; it's literary, not horticultural. This explains the author's often bizarre grouping of plants. The book is not about how to arrange plants in the garden harmoniously or deliberately otherwise, side by side, in proximity, or for overall effects in certain sections of the garden.The book is the author's foray into the literary world, as some garden writers have succumbed to this disease. It's a beautiful book, of almost no practical horticultural value.I have thought of throwing my copy in the garbage. Perhaps I will give it to a gardening friend of mine as a Christmas gift. It is not a good reference book, so I will give her replacement blades and spring for Felco #7, as well. I am a philistine, maybe, I say that this book is a beautiful garbage, like many coffee-table books are.Not recommended for practical green-fingered gardeners who ply their craft in the real gardens.

Questo libro è interessante sia come testo di giardinaggio, curato da un esperto americano famoso, ma sopratutto come raccolta di immagini catturate attraverso una tecnica particolare di scannerizzazione, che mi interessava particolarmente. Queste immagini sono molto belle ed evocative della bellezza della natura ma anche descrittive degli abbinamenti indicati nel testo secondo criteri scientifici e di" habitatat" botanico. Adatto per amanti del giardinaggio, delle immagini naturalistiche e conoscitori della lingua inglese.