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Rating: 
Summary: Fabulous book!
Review: A gardening book focused on New England wouldn't generally be my first choice for reading material -- unless they were all like Ruah Donnelly's wonderful Adventurous Gardener. Even for a confirmed non-plant type such as myself, this book is pure delight.Ostensibly a where-to-find book of New England plant resources, The Adventurous Gardener is part plant education, part local New England travel book, and part expose, albeit in the kindest of ways. For those of you who wondered just how those flower obsessives might be a bit.....odd.......,Ms. Donnelly pulls back the curtain and delivers the straight skinny. Her thumbnail sketches of nurseries and their keepers nail the nature of both plants and their guardians in the most satisfying way. This book is like popping bonbons. The Adventurous Gardener has ended up my bedside reading, with me dogearing pages of places I can't wait to visit on a day with little to do. I am contemplating whether an orchid could survive my care. If you are at all interested in New England, go ahead, indulge.....buy this and don't worry if plants aren't your thing.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Guide to Plant Adventures
Review: This is a true gem of a book for the gardener who is looking for unique plants. I have throughly enjoyed the book and having visited many local nurseries listed in the book for Massachusetts, I would say that the descriptions are very accurate. I have recommended the book to several gardening friends. My friends and I have already visited a couple of new places after having owned the book for a mere few weeks! I look forward to discovering a few more nurseries this summer. The only problem I found was that the driving directions do not include which city the driver is approaching from so I was lost once in Connecticut.
Rating:
Summary: A unique and very readable gardening guide
Review: While this book is something of a paean to New England gardening in general, and I do not live in New England, I still found it wonderful. Donnelly hasn't simply reviewed the big, obvious names (White Flower Farms, etc), but has also investigated many interesting, off-the-beaten-track nurseries that specialize in unusual and hard-to-find plants. She provides clear directions to all of them from the main roads. The book is well-written and entertaining, with excellent profiles of each nursery. The author obviously is a knowledgeable and devoted horticulturalist, judging from the names she rattles off and her intriguing descriptions of some of the more unusual varieties mentioned here. Reading this book was an education, and a fun one. I suspect it could also serve as a fine vacation guide. Some of the nurseries seem to be fairly out of the way, and given that they are located in some picturesque parts of New England (Berkshires, northeastern Connecticut, central Vermont), it's tempting to tie them together into a spring or summer driving trip. Hopefully, The Adventurous Gardener will consider some other parts of the country to sift through as well.
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