This is essentially a crash course in gardening and garden design. It evenly provides instruction on the how-tos of growing as well as providing advice on planning an attractive garden or landscape. An awful lot of it didn't apply to me because of my growing situation. For instance I live in a very hot arid climate making all the info on cold weather gardening superfluous to me and I'm an apartment dweller which removes any possibility of gardening beyond what I can do on my patio.

Despite all the information not of immediate use to me I thought this was an excellent book for beginning gardeners. It covered every aspect of gardening you could think of from raising seedlings, drip irrigation, how to check soil pH and countless other things making it a good introductory source for most any information an aspiring gardener could want. The best part is that it provided step by step instructions so neophytes like me weren't just left with the principles of say preparing a bed or composting but clueless about how to go about employing those principles.

On the whole the book emphasizes gardening for your geography and goes a long ways to facilitate putting together a garden that will thrive with the natural conditions rather than struggle against them. ( )