About this item
A design-focused, easy-to-use guide to colorful, eye-catching foliage and flowers for your whole yard, from the ground plane to the canopy, for homeowners and landscapers faced with replacing thirsty gardens in California and other dry regions in the Western US.. If readers must reluctantly remove water-guzzling favorites from the garden, they need equally beautiful substitutes! This book is a visual treat that supports the transition to dry gardening by proving that gardeners can have all the gorgeous color and flowers they had in the past using just a fraction of the water.. Maureen Gilmer provides chapters on design categories of plants - flowering shrubs, the ground plain, eye-catching accents, ephemeral flowers, perennials for color, animated plants and fine textures, canopy, and edibles - with profiles for each plant plus background info and top picks lists.. The Colorful Dry Garden is unique because it features only bold plants that are also heavy bloomers despite heat and limited water. It also features more than just Western native plants by including varieties from the worlds driest climates.
About the Author
Maureen Gilmer is a second generation Californian with over thirty years experience in arid climate gardening, landscape architecture and the environment. She's published 18 books and countless magazine features on plants, design and wildfire in the west. For a decade she's been writing a national Yardsmart column that runs every week with color photography. Yardsmart is syndicated by Tribune Content Agency including the Scripps and McClatchy newspaper chains. Maureen also writes a weekly color column for the Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs. Maureen has appeared on The View, The Early Show, Good Morning America, and was host and project designer for four seasons of Weekend Gardening, on the DIY Channel.Her newest books are focused on desert conditions and drought with the upcoming release: Growing Vegetables in Drought, Desert and Dry Times: The Complete Guide to Organic Gardening Without Wasting Water (December, 2015, Sasquatch Books) . She's author of Palm Springs-Style Gardening (Sunbelt, 2009) now in it's third printing. Maureen lives in the California desert north of Palm Springs where she's rehabilitating an old cactus garden with her husband Jim. When not gardening she's riding wilderness trails on her Arabian horse.
