However, you may also have acquired a landscape with a midlife crisis along with the deed to your new home. It is very easy to see the overplanting when you didn't do it. The sins of omission are just as apparent, but what do you do with it all? This book has lots of suggestions for both problems.
In the first chapters, Patricia Thorpe considers how to assess the problems that have come as the plants have grown and offers suggestions for choosing what to keep and what to move on, whether by removing some things and moving others
Her chapter on "Too Little" would be enough for me to buy this book if there were nothing else in it. In considering the things that have either died or been crowded out she explores the concept of the "plant postmortem" as a way of becoming a better gardener by understanding the failures. I have seen too little of this information elsewhere for everyday gardeners.
In this chapter she also deals with the myth of the "meadow in a can". Did you plant one? Is it now gone? You will understand why after you read this chapter. It wasn't your fault, you know.
In "Sins of Omission" she points out how the growth of the original landscape has probably now left you room for planting both the understory with ground covers and shrubs and the overstory with vines. Beyond that, she addresses filling in the blanks in the calendar. She says that "something always in bloom" shouldn't be the goal. Instead we should work toward "something always coming into bloom" I feel that way too and said so in this article.
