A Recipe For Continuous Bloom

A Recipe For Continuous Bloom
by Lorraine Roberts

316 pages
Plant Paradise Country Gardens™ (self-published), 2011
List price: $29.95 + tax and S&H = $40.40 CAD





As our gardens reach the midpoint of the growing season in many areas and begin the decline into what some of us look forward to as a break from it all and others become depressed that it will soon be over, we take a more serious look at what has bloomed when.

The dream garden is one that has constant bloom throughout the growing season, but that's easier said than done. Things such as soil type, moisture requirements, growing zones, and other factors all play a part and it can be frustrating and difficult to plan such a garden.

Garden center owner Lorraine Roberts has written a "recipe book" that makes this task easier. A Recipe For Continuous Bloom organizes perennials by bloom time, giving us just their very basic needs. It's a picture book (and more), with outstanding specimen photos, which simply inspires plant lovers to grow more in general.

But at the back of the book is a plant guide that gives suggestions for what to grow if you want a particular type of garden, such as a hummingbird garden. Other lists include plants for attracting butterflies, drought-tolerant plants, long-blooming perennials, North American native plants, plants that attract beneficial insects, and more.

A Recipe For Continuous Bloom is based on Roberts' home growing zone of Zone 5 in Ontario, Canada, but being in the middle of the spectrum makes this a useful book for those of other zones as well.

The book could have been better though, with just a bit of tweaking. Roberts gives us only the cold end of the zone in which the featured plants will grow, but not the warmer limit.  She labels the plants by their botanical name, but including the common names would have been a nice touch, too.

She has divided the book into sections by their light requirements, and at the top of the page in a green-colored bar that can also be seen at the pages' edges, it gives their months of bloom. Color-coding this bar by month (instead of them being all the same color) would have been a help to the reader in finding all plants that bloom in June, regardless of whether they're a shade plant or a sun plant or somewhere in-between.

Still, it's a handy book and I like its spiral binding. The photography is Roberts' and the images show off the plants well. I'll find it useful in my garden planning. For more information and purchasing information, visit her website.

Lorraine Roberts has a wealth of knowledge in the field of horticulture and has written many gardening articles for magazines. She is a speaker at Canada Blooms, the Successful Gardening Show, and horticultural societies on a wide range of topics. Lorraine and her husband, Robert, own and operate Plant Paradise Country Gardens™, an organic perennial nursery and garden centre in Caledon, Ontario, Canada, featuring extensive perennial display gardens of continuous bloom.


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The publication being reviewed in this blog post was the sole compensation for reviewing the product. All opinions expressed here are mine. If I like it, I'll say so. If I don't, I'll say that, too.