Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was disappointed in this book. True, there are some lovely photographs of the High Line, the Lurie Garden and other projects. There is a reasonable, albeit long-winded, discussion of designing a garden to mimic nature, but the production values are wanting, which is surprising because I have many books from Timber Press. The author makes reference to many plants that are not listed or described in the book, the plant is only included in a large garden dominated by grasses. I had to guess what plant he was describing. In some cases, I wrote down the name of the plant to look for it on the internet. At the back of the book there is a plant list, divided into three categories: perennials, grasses and ferns. There are no photographs of most of the plants listed; there is a schedule, similar to a spread sheet, which attempts to describe the plant. In this section of the book, the photographs of the individual plants vary greatly by quality; some are out of focus, some show flowers and no leaves, some show leaves and no flowers, most were not in scale. I had the impression that the photos were just lying around and were not taken specifically for this book. It seemed odd that there were photographs of the most common plants but no photographs of lesser known and rarer plants. The author includes many diagrams of the plant designs of many, many gardens, including block-by-block patches of the High Line. While of interest, this is over-kill and the pages would be better used to show the plants described in the gardens. Lastly, there was a sameness to the gardens featured in the book; this sameness encouraged me to study the photographs with great care. By carefully examining the photos, it was possible to discern the subtle differences between the gardens featured. The gardens in the book were in full sun; it would be interesting to know how the Oudolf principles apply to shade gardens which cannot support the many grasses featured.