A garden book of our own

Easy Gardens for South Florida recommends 100 plants with the most impact for the least amount of care. Finally, a gardening book worth the paper it's printed on.

By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published June 15, 2002

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, once observed that producing a newspaper is "the fine art of slathering ink on dead trees," a notion descriptive of all publishing. So I greet with irony the weekly arrival of dozens of books about nature and gardening, whose publishers slather lots of ink on dead trees to promote a guiding principle that usually involves keeping plants alive.

Their titles are varied, such as Brugmansia and Datura; Garden Lighting for Outdoor Entertaining, 40 Festive Projects; The Wild Garden; Gourmet Vegetables and Garden Style. I get lots of garden books with "style" in the title. They're fun to flip through, gorgeously photographed and generally useless. I am often left with a feeling of having eaten a meal with several dessert courses but no meat.

So I discovered with pleasure Easy Gardens for South Florida (Color Garden Publishing, $37.95), which its author, Pamela Crawford, shipped to the St. Petersburg Times several weeks ago. It's one of the few books I've come across that is relevant to gardeners here, well organized and full of good advice.

Crawford has a degree in landscape architecture and said she has landscaped more than 1,500 residences. But her work in her test garden on 10 acres in Palm Beach County is the backbone of this book.

Using nine criteria, she eliminated hundreds of plants and came up with a list of 100 she claims "give the most impact with the least amount of care."

[Times files] Pachystachys Lutea or Golden Shrimp plant “One of the best plants in this book,” Crawford writes, “with dramatic, beautiful flowers every day of the year with very little care in sun or shade.” According to the author, it has an average life of five years, flowers year-round and works well with crotons and pentas in the landscape.

Pentas Lanceolata “Cranberry” OR Cranberry Pentas Growers here already know these shrubby plants to be great butterfly attractors. Pentas also flower in white, pink and a clear red, and there are new dwarf varieties, but of the 16 Crawford tested, she favors this one for its vibrant color and longer life. Some companion plants are plumbago and thrysallis

Codiaeum variegatum “red spot” or red spot croton A new variety and one of several crotons Crawford features. Red Spot grows compact and bushy and like all crotons, provides dramatic foliage. She likes to pair it with green tropicals such as palms and white bird of paradise, or for more drama, Ti Red Sisters.

The plants are grouped by size and type: groundcovers, shrubs, vines, small trees, medium trees, large trees and palms. Each plant is given two pages on which Crawford offers specifics about growth and care and a photograph. A terrific innovation is a paragraph devoted to "companion plants" that work well and look good with it, along with photos. Those plants are also among the 100 best.

Crawford has a section for general landscape types such as shade gardens, tropical gardens, small gardens and salt-tolerant gardens.

Readers will be surprised that three stalwarts of most local gardens -- crape myrtles, oleanders and bougainvilleas -- did not make the cut.

"Oleanders are attacked by caterpillars that sting, and they also have a degree of toxicity that scares me," she said. "The crape myrtles I hadn't finished testing when I wrote the book. And here in South Florida, I found that I have to trim my bougainvilleas more than three times a year, which was one of my criteria."

She said that her new book, which is about decorative plants not necessarily easy to grow and maintain, is titled Color for South Florida, due out in December. It will include crape myrtles and bougainvilleas.

She said that she has been surprised by the book's popularity in Central Florida, since it was written specifically for zones 10 and 11. (We're zone 9 and just the northernmost tip of zone 10.) But readers will recognize all the plants as growable here.

She has no annuals in this book, either.

"Annuals will be in my next book. This is a book for people who are very busy," Crawford said, "who want a garden but don't have time to amend soil, change out annuals several times a year, spray for bugs, trim a lot."

Hear, hear.

One plant I took issue with in the book was Ruellia brittoniana, "Purple Showers," also known as Mexican Bluebell. Crawford calls it "a gardener's dream." I told her I'd found it to be a nightmare: one plant in a bed grew like Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors, edging out even my hardy pentas and subsuming my roses. I spent a month of hard labor pulling out the underground network of runners that every day spawned new shoots.

That quibble aside, Easy Gardens for South Florida is an excellent reference book that I am adding to my library.

Pamela Crawford will be at Barnes & Noble, 11802 N Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa on July 20 for a book signing. In addition, her book is available at some local bookstores or can be ordered from Amazon.com.

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