Need a tree flowering in summer, ideally with an exotic look? Then chitalpa is the best choice! This beautiful and hardy hybrid was created in 1964 in Uzbekistan. It is a cross between Desert Willow with rather exotic flowers and northern Catalpa.

Strawberry ground covers, blueberry hedges, grape arbors, and 39 other luscious fruits to make your yard an edible paradise

Fruit trees, shrubs, and vines are true two-for-one plants. Many varieties are strikingly beautiful — well suited to doing double duty as delicious sources of sweet, organic fruit and as ornamental additions to the home landscape. Backyard fruit plants also tie in perfectly with the growing locavore movement. It's difficult to find food that's more local than one's own backyard!

The Common Medlar is a large shrub or small tree. In Middle Europe it grows up to 3 m tall. It has luxuriant dark green foliage, elliptic, 8–15 cm long and 3–4 cm wide. The leaves turn a spectacular red in autumn before falling. The five-petalled white or pinkish flowers are produced in from May to June.

The black mulberry is generally considered the best tasting of the various mulberry species. It is grown for its delicious, raspberry-like fruit, mulberries. They have a unique tart-sweet taste and are eaten fresh or can be used just like any berry.

Practical Steps To Create A Self-Sustaining World

The Permaculture Way shows us how to consciously design a lifestyle which is low in environmental impact and highly productive. It demonstrates how to meet our needs, make the most of resources by minimizing waste and maximizing potential, and still leave the Earth richer than we found it

Osmanthus is a genus of about 15-20, while only a few ones are hardy enough to grow down to zone 6. Those are often mistaken for hollies owing to their foliage appearance. Osmanthus is native to Japan and China, some species originate in the south of USA.

Garden Ponds, Fountains & Waterfalls for Your Home provides essential information on designing and installing all types of home water gardens, from naturalistic to formal, plus fountains, waterfalls, streams, and bog gardens.

Britain is famous all over the world for its gardens. In this book Helena Attlee focuses on twenty of the finest gardens in the country. Her choice encompasses a rich selection of sites all over England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, ranging from famous eighteenth-century landscapes such as Stourhead to quirky modern gardens such as Charles Jencks' Garden of Cosmic Speculation in the Scottish borders. Her lively text provides a brief history of each garden combined with a vivid account of its main features.

Campsis radicans - tree form

This is the species of north-american trumpet creeper trained into a tree with a real stem. It bears terminal cymes of rich red, trumpet-shaped flowers from early summer until the first frosts. Pinnate leaves are deep green and enhance its tropical appearance.

Drummondii is a variegated form of Norway maple, only some 100 years old. The decades from its birth proved its popularity which is still very high. The leaves are beautifully creamy white variegated at the margins, with bright green centres.

A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture

The first edition of Gaia’s Garden sparked the imagination of America’s home gardeners, introducing permaculture’s central message: Working with Nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers.

Cultivation, Use in Landscaping and Propagation

This excellent volume of Australian native plants includes over 1500 species of plants, trees, shrubs, annuals, ground covers, bedding plants and climbers for your garden.

The Best Plants for the Toughest Spot in Your Garden

In this book you'll learn how to prune selectively to admit more light and how to amend soil to increase its moisture retention. You'll also learn about more than 130 plants that accept reduced light and moisture levels-long-blooming woodland gems like epimediums and hellebores, and even lush foliage plants like evergreen ferns and hardy gingers, shrubs, climbers, perennials, ground covers, bulbs, annuals, and perennials - there is an entire palette to help you transform challenging spaces into rich, rewarding gardens

‘Heat’ is a powerful sensory stimulus – look at how it is used in advertising everything from perfumes to cars. Heat equates to danger, excitement, sexual attraction. Plants can very much evoke a sense of heat too, with vivid colours setting the pulse racing. Rudbeckia and Echinacea are two prairie flowers that love it as the mercury climbs and look just right shimmering in the sun. Add into the mix the calming balance of some flowering grasses and you have a ready-made planting combination that will cope with the driest of summers.

Bluebeard is an attractive shrub with rare late summer/early autumn flowering. In colder zones it is supposed to be a perennial rather than a woody shrub as it may freeze down to the ground.