Bringing The Mediterranean Into Your Garden

Mediterranean garrigue landscapes are extraordinarily beautiful: alternating mounds of silver and green, textured leaves, flashes of colour and intoxicating scents combine to delight the senses and rival any cultivated garden with half the work. This book offers inspiration and expert advice on growing the plants and adopting a new more natural way of gardening. Mediterranean plants are diverse and adapted to a wide range of environments and weather conditions. They are of course ideally suited to regions which experience long periods of seasonal drought but many will also withstand periods of high rainfall and extreme cold making this book essential reading for temperate-zone gardeners seeking the Mediterranean look. Some understanding of plant ecology is essential for success and Filippi shares his expert knowledge acquired from decades of research. How a plant interacts with its environment, other plants, and other living things indicates what it needs to flourish in a garden setting.

Coastal gardeners throughout the United States will benefit from the advice in this practical, inspirational, and illustrated book on Mediterranean gardening, which is beautiful year-round.

You can create a truly beautiful garden using exciting and exotic plants, yet at the same time eliminate the need for extra water and reduce the maintenance required. Your garden will be lush, full of colour and interest all year round, and rather than constantly weeding, watering and working, you can relax in your own Mediterranean haven. Book jacket

Making a garden that can withstand summer drought without irrigation is the dream of many who wish to garden in harmony with the environment. In this classic work on gardening in dry climates, first published in 2008, Olivier Filippi offers practical advice to achieve this goal based on his, and his wife Clara's, experience of working with Mediterranean-region plants for more than 30 years. The first part of the book examines the behavior of plants that face drought in their natural habitat. What is drought and how do plants manage to survive when little water is available? The second part is concerned with gardening techniques in a dry climate. How do you prepare the soil, when do you plant, and how do you maintain a dry garden? The third and longest part describes in detail no less than 500 rewarding plants that are well-adapted to dry gardens, each classified by a unique dry resistance code. The Dry Gardening Handbook is essential reading for gardeners who live in one of the world's Mediterranean climate zones and will also be of interest to gardeners in areas where drought is becoming a recurring problem.

A large-format, beautifully illustrated, complete guide to gardening in a California and Mediterraean-like climates, defined as ones in which winters are wet and summers are bone dry.

Examines landscaping in the Mediterranean region and observes how specific sites are created to compliment the beauty of the natural landscape.

First published in French as Alternatives au gazon in 2011.

Dry summer, wet winter climate? This is your must have plant guide. Selecting plants suited to your climate is the first step toward a thriving, largely self-sustaining garden that connects with and supports the natural world. With gentle and compelling text and stunning photographs of plants in garden settings, Gardening in Summer-Dry Climates by Nora Harlow and Saxon Holt is a guide to native and climate-adapted plants for summer-dry, winter-wet climates of North America's Pacific coast. Knowing what these climates share and how and why they differ, you can choose to make gardens that maintain and expand local and regional biodiversity, take little from the earth that is not returned, and welcome and accommodate the presence of wildlife. With global warming, it is now even more critical that we garden in tune with climate.

Now that growing your own food is back in fashion — for health, financial, and environmental reasons — Mariano Bueno gives full practical details on how to grow vegetables alongside fruit trees and a variety of aromatic, medicinal and ornamental plants and herbs. He gives the individual requirements of common garden vegetables and popular fruit trees and provides a calendar that describes how to care for the kitchen garden through the gardening year. Explaining how to meet the particular challenges of growing edible plants in a hot, dry climate, with advice on matters such as irrigation, the book will be useful for those who live in a Mediterranean area or find themselves gardening in ever-hotter, dry climates. But it is also abundant in expertise on gardening in other climatic conditions, too, and is available here to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

Garden-makers from all over the world are redefining Mediterranean style in harmony with international trends. From the smallest city courtyard to the largest landscape projects, these creations set off the famous Provençal landscapes in a hundred different ways.