A perennial garden is an ever-changing source of delight. Each season brings new colors and textures in flowers and foliage. As the years go by, perennial plantings mature and interweave into forms more beautiful and surprising than a season's growth of annuals can ever give. Best of all, a perennial garden can grow almost anywhere with plants suited to local soils, temperatures, and rainfall. This book is a complete guide to perennial gardening in Texas and similar regions of eastern New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas. In Part One, Julie Ryan offers a historical sketch of cottage gardens and perennial borders, with a sampler of some of their modern variations. In Part Two, she defines the major ecological regions of Texas and, with words and color photographs, takes you on a tour of lovely public and private gardens in each region. You'll find all the "how to" information for creating your own garden in Part Three. Ms. Ryan describes and pictures over 300 flowering perennials, bulbs, foliage plants, and old roses suitable for Texas gardens, with lists of companion annuals, vines, shrubs, and small trees. Accompanying charts provide quick reference to each plant's preferred regions and cultivation requirements. In addition, Ms. Ryan discusses how to design a garden and select plants, prepare the beds, and deal with garden pests. She concludes with substantial lists of resources, including mail-order suppliers of perennials, bulbs, and old roses.

Originally published: Dallas, Tex.: Taylor Pub. Co., c1989.

Perennial Gardening in Texas presents its own unique challenges, especially with the state's wide variety of climate zones. This book focuses on individual plants—some 120 species—but also brings with it the expertise of a landscape architect in providing designs that will work both damp and water-scarce areas.

Complemented by more than 180 watercolor illustrations, a guide for selecting flowers for every season of the year, geared toward the unique chracteristics and climate of Texas, helps would-be horticulturalists mix and match blooms of various heights and colors with an innovative flip-page format that covers more than two hundred plants and their cultivation.

One of America's biggest and most diverse landscapes begins in your yard. There's no way around it: Texas is huge. The state dials in at well over 250,000 square miles, housing most of the United States' power grid, arguably all of its delicious food, and almost every kind of environment imaginable: formidable mountains, rolling hills, flat plains, and coastline. If you're a home gardener, knowing what to do when can be overwhelming--that's where Texas Month-by-Month Gardening, the companion book to our Texas Getting Started Garden Guide, comes to the rescue. Inside, Houston horticulturist Robert "Skip" Richter makes it easy with a in-depth month-by-month breakdown of what to plant, when to plant, and how to take care of it in order to have a beautiful Texas garden all year round. During each month, you'll learn to plan, plant, care for, water, fertilize, and troubleshoot in-season annuals, bulbs, lawns, natives, perennials, roses, shrubs, trees, vines, and groundcovers. As with all of our renowned gardening books, you're treated to gorgeous full-color "here's how" and plant photography and USDA zone maps. Plus, you'll get a detailed introduction to gardening specifically in the Lone Star State. So have no fear: from the red buckeyes in Dallas to Sunshine roses in Abilene, you'll have the best little garden in the biggest state around. For our full introduction to gardening in Texas, we also recommend companion books Texas Getting Started Garden Guide and Texas Fruit & Vegetable Gardening.

In Memory of Dianan Beaugh, James R. Heathman Donated By Sidney & Mignon McBride.

In this comprehensive, richly illustrated guide, author George Oxford Miller provides the "how-to," "when-to," and "what-to" for gardeners, landscapers, and homeowners throughout Texas. Have you ever planted a beautiful—and expensive—shrub in your yard and watched it slowly die because it was in the wrong location? Insufficient sunlight, too much water, improper soil, or too hot an exposure can turn the nursery-perfect specimen into an eyesore. This all-in-one DIY guide helps you beautify your yard using low-maintenance native plants specifically adapted to your local growing conditions. Whether as foundation hedges, mass plantings, or accent shrubs, Texas’ vast offering of native species can bring year-round beauty to any lawn space. Covering wildflowers, shrubs, trees, vines, cacti, and groundcovers, this book selects the species that combine ornamental qualities, growth habit, adaptability, and year-round beauty for the highest landscape value. Chapters include photos, maps, charts, and design samples to provide guidelines for species selection and planting, ongoing maintenance, landscape design, and water and energy conservation. Plant descriptions provide detailed habitat requirements for hundreds of native plants, and photos illustrate how each plant looks in the landscape. In Landscaping with Native Plants of Texas, new and experienced gardeners alike will find the facts and advice needed to choose the plants best adapted for their particular landscape. The ornamental beauty of Texas’ native species and the economic advantages of using plants adapted to the local climate demonstrate that the best for our landscapes often comes from our own backyards. And perhaps most importantly, using native plants encourages the repair and preservation of natural plant communities and the wildlife they shelter.