Plant Partners Book

Anna Pavord has no patience for dwarf plants, pastels or winter gardens, not to mention all-white beds. She has a sharp eye and a predilection for cheeky Britishisms and she's not afraid to use either. Plant Partners is organised into seasons--the real growing seasons: signs of spring, spring turns to summer, high summer, and into autumn. Within these seasons Pavord presents 60 "star" plants that should be highlighted in the perennial bed. For each of her favourite plants she provides a supporting cast of two varieties--annuals, bulbs or perennials--that partner particularly well with the stars and under the same soil and light conditions. The groupings might be designed so that all of the flowers will be in bloom at once (Pasque flower with grape hyacinth and deep-purple primroses, for example), or so that when one flower's blooms are just starting to fade another's are waiting in the wings (lily-of-the-valley with a hellebore and barrenwort). A listing of "alternative" partners extends the range of choices to include more unusual plants and ones that might be more challenging to grow. Foliage is given as much consideration as blooms: 'Darling! Salmon! How brave!' exclaim the white-garden brigade as they sharpen their pruning knives for a horticultural mercy-killing. You might as well fall on your garden fork there and then as try to explain that the point of the rodgersia they are looking at is not the buff-pink flower but the whirls of bronze underneath it. But her exhortation to use foliage--as well as grasses and non-flowering perennials as "star" plants--to best advantage cannot be ignored in Plant Partners. Pavord's advice throughout is, as always, practical and opinionated and highly entertaining. --Liana FredleyRead More