Tending Your Garden: A Year-Round Guide to Garden Maintenance

By Gordon Hayward and Mary Hayward

Book Overview

Gardening is the primary recreational activity of Americans. Since the 1980s, when gardening caught fire as a national passion, we have spent billions of dollars on what we grow for our own pleasure; and in all that time, not one book has been published on the broad subject of garden maintenance.

For twenty-five years, the Haywards, expert horticultural consultants and authors of many books and articles, have been tending their own garden in Vermont. Here, beautiful photographs illustrate how and what the Haywards do in their garden from earliest spring until snowfall: pruning trees and shrubs; planting, staking, and dividing perennials; and edging, deadheading, and weeding. They also include many tips for reducing maintenance. Their advice can be put to work in the reader's garden, regardless of size or location. Line drawings by Elayne Sears give more details on specific techniques. Anecdotal, encouraging, and crammed with information, this is a gorgeous treatment of a very practical subject.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393059049
• ISBN13: 9780393059045
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 2.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 9.1" x 10.8"

Customer Reviews

Indispensable - the best garden care book I have read.

I recently inherited several very extensive flower, vegetable and fruit gardens with the home I purchased. Lately I have been haunting the gardening section of my local libraries reading everything about gardening that I can get my hands on, but this is by far the most helpful book I've come across. It is absolutely awesome. Everything is extremely clear and straightforward, from the text to the photographs. It's also very reassuring for someone (such as myself!) who is feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the tasks that must be accomplished. This book outlines everything, from the whens to the hows and whys. It's especially helpful for people who have all different kinds of things in their garden - fruit trees, shade trees, perennials, vegetables, vines, etc. I'm so glad I bought this book.

A Garden Maintenance Book Everyone Should Have

As the owner of Gardening Graces, a garden and landscape design/build/maintain business in Michigan, I was eager to get a book that dealt strictly with garden maintenance. Tending Your Garden met all my expectations and more. It is well written and thorough. The author's style is personable making it all the more pleasurable to read. The pictures are well photographed in that they both display the beauty of the gardens in all their seasons while also depicting the procedure or technique being described with great finesse. I enjoy experiencing the fellowship of the these two gardeners as they speak to me about something that both they and I have a great deal of passion.

Tending Your Garden

For the novice or experienced gardener this book provides a valuable step by step process for building, maintaining and enhancing your garden throughout the year. As the owner of a retail nursery our time limitations often affect our ability to do the research necessary to answer our customers' questions. This simply written guide has already proven to be a valuable resource for us and our customers...to whom we often refer this book. Carol Nelson-The Nursery at Antler Inn

Wife loves it.

I bought this as a gift. It must be good because my wife reads it often!