As families spend more time at home, they're expanding their living space to their yards, decks, and patios. When you're ready to upgrade the look of your landscape, Landscaping For Dummies offers advice on installing fences and walkways, choosing hardy plants and trees, and enhancing natural habitats for the critters and creatures lurking in your neighborhood. You'll find out how to make your backyard a relaxing retreat space and discover the enjoyment and satisfaction that comes from working in your yard.

Landscaping For Dummies includes:

• Lists of recommended plants and varieties, including the best ones for privacy plantings, low-maintenance groundcovers, and small gardens
• Advice on how to deal with special landscaping concerns, including fire-prone areas, bee and butterfly gardens, and drought-tolerant and native landscapes
• Instructions on installing permanent features like decks, patios, fences, and more
• Pointers on how to water more efficiently, including the latest tools and technologies that can save you time

With a little bit of planning and some digging, trimming, or planting, you'll be set to enjoy your yard whenever the mood strikes. Let Landscaping For Dummies be your guide to making the most of your outdoor space.

In his groundbreaking book Bringing Nature Home, Douglas W. Tallamy reveals the unbreakable link between native plant species and native wildlife--native insects cannot, or will not, eat alien plants. When native plants disappear, the insects disappear, impoverishing the food source for birds and other animals. As development and habitat destruction accelerate, there are increasing pressures on wildlife populations.

Luckily, there is an important and simple step we can all take to help reverse this alarming trend: everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution toward sustaining biodiversity by simply choosing native plants. By acting on Douglas Tallamy's practical and achievable recommendations, we can all make a difference.

Updated with new projects, tables, and sections detailing commonly used landscape sand, gravel, and stone materials, Landscaping with Stone, Third Edition, is a complete and accessible guide to landscape design and outdoor projects for the home and garden. Discover xeriscape landscaping ideas, stone garden tips, water-wise gardening tips, and much more! Featuring a framework for stone landscaping ideas and designs - including a look at the different types of stone, sources of inspiration, and ways to think about stone in relation to other landscape elements - you'll also learn need-to-know tips for working with stone. Also included in this comprehensive landscaping book are 12 step-by-step projects for some of the most popular stone projects, including patios, fire pits, fountains, walls, rock gardens, and more.

Finally, a Book with All the Secrets to Growing Great Hydrangeas!

This book reveals all the ins and outs to growing hydrangeas. If you're at all confused about pruning this shrub - and who isn't? - this book will clear things up. If you're worried about how much water to give it especially when it droops in the sun, this book explains it all. And what about transplanting: when is the best time to do that? Chapter four has the answers to that one and covers it all.

How to get your plant to bloom

Let's not forget the most common issue people have with this plant: how can I get it to flower reliably? You'll get the scientific insight needed to better site your plant, and how to care for it. Then you can just sit back and watch it flower for you.

How is the info presented?

• You'll have the benefit of over 150 photos and illustrations that are used to cover the subject;
• Fourteen color coded chapters delve into propagation, fertilizing, pruning, pests and diseases (those ugly black spots!), flower color, and so much more;
• In case you need it, several pages are devoted to how to use these shrubs in your garden;
• The handy index gets your hydrangea questions answered on the spot when you need them in a quick and easy way

Who is Lorraine Ballato

Lorraine Ballato is a well known garden writer and speaker. She is also the resident hydrangea expert at the New York Botanical Garden where she has been teaching hydrangea classes for over 10 years.

A much-appreciated gift

Even if you don't grow hydrangeas, I bet you know someone who does and would love to get this book as a gift. All kinds of celebrations from birthdays to Mother's Day to Valentine's Day, and other holidays present lots of opportunities to gift someone with this best selling book.

Order yours today

You can get an inscribed or signed copy from the author's website (LorraineBallato.Com) or an unsigned copy with the click of a button. Get yours today, just in time for this season.

Without a tractor and with an impatience to get her seeds planted for the season, Ruth Stout stumbled upon an unorthodox way to sow her garden: rather than plowing the earth, she would simply make her seedling rows in between mounds of compost she had lain over the previous fall and winter.

In her endearing and folksy voice, Stout tells the tale of her move in 1930 from New York City to a 55-acre farm in the rural Connecticut hamlet of Poverty Hollow. With little experience and a cast of helpers and advisors, she tells the story of a woman's toiling, making mistakes, and learning the pastime of gardening. In the spring of 1944, she experienced an epiphany that would chart a new method of planting: Throw away your spade and hoe.

How to Have a Green Thumb is an infectious narrative of lessons learned and practical advice for anyone not afraid to get their hands dirty in pursuit of a bountiful and healthy garden. It provides practical advice on dealing with pests, a catalogue of the common vegetable varieties and flowering plants, and, of course, mulching. It is a book that any gardener will treasure and refer to again and again.

This book is also available from Echo Point Books as a hardcover (ISBN 1648373526).

This thoughtful, intelligent gardening book will help readers create a garden that nurtures the wildlife communities surrounding them (The New York Times Book Review).

Many gardeners today want a home landscape that nourishes and fosters wildlife, but they also want beauty, a space for the kids to play, privacy, and maybe even a vegetable patch. Sure, it's a tall order, but The Living Landscape shows you how to do it. You'll learn the strategies for making and maintaining a diverse, layered landscape--one that offers all of the following:

*Beauty on multiple levels
*Outdoor rooms and turf areas for children and pets
*Fragrance and edible plants
*Shelter and sustenance for wildlife

Richly illustrated, The Living Landscape will enable you to build the garden of your dreams.

Many owners of lawn care and landscape businesses found their companies on the belief that they would make more money working for themselves than they would as employees. Dedicated to the maintenance and beautification of properties, they believe that their hard work and their expertise in softscape, hardscape, irrigation, or snow plowing will guarantee their company's success. But technical knowledge alone won't generate profit or help a company grow. In fact, the owners of lawn care and landscape companies often find themselves sacrificing their personal health and family life as they struggle to stay afloat and turn a tiny profit.

It doesn't have to be this way. By decreasing their expenses, managing their cash flow, and planning for strategic growth, these business owners can transform their companies into profit-making machines that reward them generously for their hard work, passion, and entrepreneurial spirit.

Profit First for Lawn Care and Landscape Businesses provides a comprehensive, industry-specific toolbox, not available anywhere else. The Green Profit Toolbox(TM) was created to help owners of lawn care and landscape industry businesses ensure strong profits and long-term growth. Christeen Era has identified not only key business models and best practices in the industry but also the hidden bleeds that kill your profit margin and destroy your bottom line. She helps you see what you never saw before with assessments that provide a clear, accurate snapshot of your current operations. She's mapped out a road to success that helps you identify your best customers and most profitable services, allowing you to smash through the unseen obstacles that stand in your way. Best of all, she's your biggest supporter. When you use the Profit First for Lawn Care and Landscape Businesses program, you pay yourself first, and you pay yourself well.

Do you want more income and more time to spend with your family? Do you want to stop worrying about making your payroll and paying your taxes? Do you want to grow your business without taking on crushing debt? Profit First for Lawn Care and Landscape Businesses explains how to achieve these goals, helping you achieve long-term business stability, strategic growth, and (just maybe) the life of your dreams.

Indispensable. --The New York Times Book Review

Piet Oudolf's gardens--unique combinations of long-lived perennials and woody plants that are rich in texture and sophisticated in color--are breathtaking and have deep emotional resonance. With Planting, designers and home gardeners can recreate these plant-rich, beautiful gardens that support biodiversity and nourish the human spirit.
An intimate knowledge of plants is essential to the success of modern landscape design, and Planting shares Oudolf's considerable understanding of plant ecology, explaining how plants behave in different situations, what goes on underground, and which species make good neighbors. Extensive plant charts and planting plans will help you choose plants for their structure, color, and texture. A detailed directory shares details like each plant's life expectancy, the persistence of its seedheads, and its propensity to self-seed.

Thoroughly 'user friendly' in organization and presentation, The Home-Scale Forest Garden is unique and strongly recommended.--Midwest Book Review

2020 independent Press Award Winner--Green Book Category

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2 is a how-to guide enabling you to plant the rain by creating water-harvesting earthworks or rain gardens. Earthworks are simple, inexpensive strategies and landforms that passively harvest multiple sources of free on-site water including rainfall, stormwater runoff, air conditioning condensate, and greywater within living tanks of soil and vegetation. The plants then pump the water back out in the form of beauty, food, shelter, wildlife habitat, timber and forage, while controlling erosion, reducing down-stream flooding, dropping utility costs, increasing soil fertility, and improving water and air quality.

This revised and expanded full-color second edition builds on the information in Volume 1 by showing you how to turn your yard, school, business, park, and neighborhood into lively, regenerative producers of resources. Conditions at home will improve as you simultaneously enrich the ecosystem and inspire the surrounding community.

Learn to select, place, size, construct, and plant your chosen earthworks. All is made easier and more effective by the illustrations of natural patterns of water and sediment flow with which you can collaborate or mimic. Detailed step-by-step instructions with over 550 images show you how to do it, and plentiful stories of success motivate you so you will do it

The treasures of mid-century American architecture have long been celebrated. Less appreciated has been the landscape design that provides the framing for these masterworks. But more than frame, landscape architecture is an art worthy of the spotlight, particularly at mid-century, when the notion that gardens are outdoor spaces for people to live in was championed and brought to the fore; now gardens and landscapes are not just external attributes to the house but a continuation of it and its living spaces in a relationship of symbiosis, with its pools and terraces, its winding lawns, and its partly enclosed room-like spaces flanked by brick or stone or plantings in a range of colors and forms.

Approximately seventy-five mostly residential projects are thoroughly documented and recounted. Landscape architects whose work is featured include Thomas Church, Lawrence Halprin, and Garrett Eckbo, among others. Highlights include the dramatic surrounds of Richard Neutra's Perkins House in its Pasadena hillside setting and Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin County Civic Center, where environment and building comingle in an extraordinary modernist vision of the future made real.

This book is both a wishful gesture toward a realignment of building with nature and a must-have for anyone with a visceral appreciation for a designed environment understood as an integrated whole. Ultimately, the book underlines the fundamental importance of gardens and landscape design, intended in the widest possible sense, for the quality of living of all individuals.

Shows us that guiding natural processes rather than fighting them is the key to creating healthier landscapes and happier gardeners. --Doug Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home

Larry Weaner is an icon in the world of ecological landscape design, and now his revolutionary approach is available to home gardeners. Garden Revolution shows how an ecological approach to planting can lead to beautiful gardens that buck much of conventional gardening's counter-productive, time-consuming practices. Instead of picking the wrong plant and then weeding, irrigating, and fertilizing, Weaner advocates for choosing plants that are adapted to the soil and climate of a specific site and letting them naturally evolve over time. This lushly-photographed reference is for anyone looking for a better, smarter way to garden.

Learn the Essentials of Creating Beautiful, Fire-Resistant Properties

With wildfires getting more frequent and ferocious, approximately 120 million US citizens live with the threat of being overrun. Are you one of them? If so, Firescaping helps you create a safer environment. This unique form of landscaping design keeps your property healthy, clean, and clear. Land management expert Douglas Kent shares decades of experience working in many of the nation's most flammable areas.

Get the information needed to determine your property's degree of fire risk. Learn effective design strategies for your home and landscape, as well as key characteristics that make your property more accessible to firefighters. With checklists, simple instructions, and tips that truly work, this practical, hands-on guide is a valuable resource for homeowners, business owners, landscape professionals, and fire protection agencies. If you live in an area at risk, this book can help to prepare you and give you peace of mind.

A veritable goldmine for gardeners. --Plant Talk

We've all seen gorgeous perennial gardens packed with color, texture, and multi-season interest. Designed by a professional and maintained by a crew, they are aspirational bits of beauty too difficult to attempt at home. Or are they?

The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden makes a design-magazine-worthy garden achievable at home. The new, simplified approach is made up of hardy, beautiful plants grown on a 10x14 foot grid. Each of the 62 garden plans combines complementary plants that thrive together and grow as a community. They are designed to make maintenance a snap. The garden plans can be followed explicitly or adjusted to meet individual needs, unlocking rich perennial landscape designs for individualization and creativity.

In Environmental Solutions for Grounds Management, Kevin Scott Mercer draws from over thirty years of hands-on experience to present a comprehensive guide for sustainable grounds management. From the intricacies of stormwater management to fostering biodiversity, Mercer's strategic approach blends environmental stewardship with practical solutions. Learn how to enhance landscapes without compromising aesthetics, reduce stormwater runoff, promote wildlife habitats, and soil amendments from food waste and compost tea. Whether you are a grounds manager, horticulturist, golf course superintendent or a landscape professional, this book offers valuable insights to help you tackle today's environmental challenges while achieving economic returns. Dive into Mercer's award-winning strategies and transform your grounds into thriving ecosystems.