"This practical guide is lush with clear, step-by-step advice." -Real Simple Whether you are a new gardener or a green thumb, The Well-Tended Perennial Garden is here to help you successfully plan, plant, and tend your garden. This hardworking guide includes thorough details on the essential practices of perennial care-included deadheading, pinching, and thinning-along with growing information for specific species and cultivars, on-trend garden design advice, a monthly planting and maintenance schedule, and details on native plants and gardening for wildlife. The Well-Tended Perennial Garden will be your ally in the quest for a beautiful, well-maintained garden. This completely revised third edition of the bestselling classic The Well-Tended Perennial Garden is a must-have ally in the quest for a beautiful, well-maintained garden. Tracy DiSabato-Aust has worked in the horticulture industry for over forty years earning international acclaim as one of America's best-known and most knowledgeable garden writers, speakers, and designers. She has spoken internationally at venues like England's Royal Horticultural Society Garden, The Royal Botanic Gardens, The English Gardening School, and the University of Oxford Botanical Gardens. DiSabato-Aust has been featured in Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Garden Design, Real Simple, The New York Times, Telegraph, and the National Post. Her website is tracylive.com. Preface We are thrilled to offer this information-packed, beautiful, and inspiring third edition of The Well-Tended Perennial Garden! In an effort to stay topical in the rapidly changing world of perennial gardening, we felt an update to the original edition from 1998 (that's right-can you believe it?) and the expanded edition from 2006 was in order. Exciting changes to this edition include more than 50 new plant encyclopedia entries, dozens of new cultivars, scores of new photographs and illustrations, updates to some of my original garden design projects, and visual stories of new design projects. If you have the previous two editions of Well-Tended Perennial Garden you will also appreciate the updated Perennials by Maintenance Needs, which has been expanded in this third edition. New perennials are being introduced daily and it's hard to keep up! Our goal isn't to provide every new perennial or cultivar (these are well covered in other publications), but to address these new plants from a maintenance perspective, which is a viewpoint unique to this book. What are the care, and more specifically, pruning, needs of these plants? Which cultivars are more reliable, hardier, or long-lived performers? Which ones have I used for years that still pass the test of a great plant? Working in the horticulture industry for 4 decades now, I've seen many changes. I have always used native plants in my designs, but the emphasis on their use is even greater today. Perennials are being incorporated into rain gardens, rooftop gardens, container gardens, and mixed gardens. They are joining trees, shrubs, bulbs, annuals, and vegetables in the garden, rather than being strictly relegated to traditional perennial beds. There is the desire to grow dynamic yet low maintenance plants that are deer resistant and drought tolerant, that don't require frequent pruning or care to look their best. Many new, safe organic fertilizers and pest controls are readily available. We address these issues here. Thankfully, many of the sound horticultural practices that were discussed in the book's first edition still hold true today; you will find they remain in these pages, both in recommendations and in the examples of featured gardens. Thank you for supporting this book and its mission all these years. Besides being one of the all-time bestselling and most-sustaining gardening publications available since it

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