Hot Color, Dry Garden: Inspiring Designs and Vibrant Plants for the Waterwise Gardener

I like this book. It was recommended to me by my Landscape designer, and now I have many of these plants in my yard. The book is great for reference and nice to just read through as well. Nice pictures.

Great pictures and ideas in this book. Helped me select drought tolerant plants for my front yard that also add color and look great. The project is in progress, I will try to add photos when finished. Great book!

Basics for desert area states, good information. Nice material for beginners…

In an era when homeowners in the southwest are receiving rebates from water districts to remove their lawns and too often replace them with landscape fabric, decomposed granite, and a few sorry succulents or agaves, this book provides real inspiration for vibrant, lush, yet waterwise landscapes. I'd compare it to Ken Druse's classics such as The Natural Garden or The Natural Shade Garden--it provides design inspiration plus many practical tips and a wonderful plant directory of lesser-known but striking and reliable plants. I have a number of books on California native plants and mediterranean plants but this fills a unique niche.

Muy lindo libro, con hermosas fotos y textos.

We’re starting from scratch on a blank garden, and this book is full of ideas for our zone 9 area in California, where water is a scarce resource. It’s full of great examples from a variety of styles, and it lists a great variety of dry-garden plants with photos. I’m excited to get started on our new project, this book at hand. Well done!

The photos in this book have captions that are on the following page. Thus to learn the name of the plants in a photo, the reader must flip forward one page to read the names of the plants. Then they must flip back one page to review how the caption relates to the individual plants. I would not recommend this book based on the difficulty in looking at captioned photographs. The content is excellent and you have done the author a dis-service by making it impossible to enjoy.

Great pics, info and ideas for a desert garden. Nice quality book.

This is a beautiful book. The photographs are, for the most part, excellent and are a pleasure to view even if you've no plans to emulate the plantings. Aimed at gardeners in the arid American SW, it is nevertheless of interest to those of us who live in, what the author tactfully calls, 'moodier' climes. A minor criticism from our viewpoint is that she devotes only passing consideration to 'architectural plants' which are what jump out at me in the photographs. Her remit is colour which is simple for us but perhaps less so in desert areas (she argues that this need not be so). What we have more trouble with is the 'spikey' architecturals but plants like Yucca rostrata, Y. linearifolia, Dasilyrions and Nolinas will survive our winters if kept dry. Agaves, which she does cover, similarly. I suspect that some of her examples can be replicated here during the summer months with different species providing a similar effect.

Excellent! masterpiece, great book.

Un libro con un enfoque diferente a la jardinería tradicional.

good

This is aimed at the Mediterranean and desert climates of California and states further east. It's packed full of photographs of completed gardens so is useful for design inspiration, and has a comprehensive directory listing succulents and cacti not covered by other dry gardening books. They're all very colourful plants so it shows a different aesthetic to what's normally found if you're gardening in European Mediterranean climate areas. Dimensions and temperatures are in imperial units.