New York Flora Association Blog

Designing Gardens with Flora of the American East
Carolyn Summers, with illustrations by Michele Hertz

Gardeners are endowed with love for a hobby that has profound potential for positive change. The beautifully-illustrated Designing Gardens with Flora of the American East approaches landscape design from an ecological perspective, encouraging professional designers and backyard enthusiasts alike to intensify their use of indigenous or native plants. These plants, ones that grow naturally in the same place in which they evolved, form the basis of the food web. Wildlife simply cannot continue to survive without them—nor can we. Summers introduces our wild flora into designs for common garden landscapes, such as foundation plantings, mixed borders, even formal knot gardens.

Emphasizing the importance of indigenous plant gardening and landscape design, Summers provides guidelines for beginning gardeners as well as experienced designers.
She highlights . . .
an in-depth scientific, coherent argument for the necessity of using indigenous plants in cultivated landscapes concrete design guidance, including actual designs, along with trees, shrubs, groundcovers, and other showy substitutes for invasive plants the best ways to use exotic plants responsibly, including controlling plant reproduction, choosing cultivars and hybrids, and more joys of “safe sex in the garden”
practical issues of finding and purchasing native plants.

From Maine to Kentucky and up and down the eastern shore, Designing Gardens with Flora of the American East lays the “gardenwork”—by preserving natural areas through the thoughtful planting of indigenous plants, we may bask in the knowledge that it is possible to have loads of fun at the same time we are growing a better world.

Rutgers University Press
224 pages * 16 color and 62 black and white photographs, 9 illustrations, and 26 tables * 6 x 9
978-0-8135-4707-7 * Paper * $23.95
978-0-8135-4706-0 * Cloth * $39.95

This beautiful treatment of New York’s wildflowers can be found at http://chestofbooks.com/flora-plants/flowers/Wild-Flowers-New-York/index.html