The Mix & Match Color Guide to Annuals and Perrenials

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Beautiful
Review: I have never seen such a gorgeous flower book! Packed full of colorful photos of flowers. It does lack a little on the informtional side (for example what zone do the flowers grow best in...) but for inspiration, you cannot find a better book anywhere!

Rating:
Summary: Superb for dabblers who don't want to look like dabblers
Review: This book was captivating at first glance, and it keeps getting better. This is not a comprehensive how-to-grow-flowers guide for beginners, but rather a planning tool for evaluating color/height/form combinations.

The bulk of the book comprises four sets of horizontal strips, spiral-bound, each showing a full-color photo on one side and a description on the facing side (description includes scientific and common name, a sketch of the plant's growth habit, including height and spread, a paragraph or two on the flower, the flower's season of bloom, and sun/moisture/exposure/soil type/zone requirements). There are something like 50 or 60 flowers per section. Flip them back and forth to make umptey-ump combinations of flowers.

The sections are arranged, as you might expect, by height--that is, the flowers shown in the lowest set of strips are all low-growing (pansies, alyssum, and so on) and the ones shown in the top set of strips are the tallest (sunflowers, etc.) But aha! it took me a while to notice that they're also arranged by growing season--that is, the flowers in the earlier pages are spring bloomers, while the ones toward the back of the book bloom late in the season. Clever!

My grade-school daughter and I have spent hours flipping back and forth, looking for that just-right combination of colors, shapes, and heights for our flower patch. (Some of the strips suggest suitable companions; the strips are numbered for reference.) It's really helped her (and me) focus on combinations and how flowers will actually look in context--making it much simpler to visit the garden center and come away with something that will *work*, as opposed to a little of this, that, the other, and whatever was eye-catching or on sale on that particular day!

The rest of the book has a bit of basic information and a dozen or so sample plantings, again with lovely color photos and a minimum of detail (but probably enough to get on with, if you've ever put trowel to earth before).

[Quibbles: Not much distinction is made between annuals, biennials, and perennials (that is, you might not notice that that flower marked for late-spring bloom must be sowed the year before... the info is there, it's just not very prominent). Not all of the photos are to scale; some of the low-growing blooms are shown quite large in comparison to the taller ones. I didn't notice any listing of sources for seeds or plants; a reference list of seed catalogs would have been nice. But these are trivial flaws for the most part.]

All in all, worth the money just for the fun of it. But if you use it to make a plan and stick to it, you'll probably save the price of the book in ill-considered plant purchases as well. We'll write again when our garden is as pretty as we've imagined it...