Book Review: Annuals with Style

You know it's going to be an interesting book when the cover photograph is not a bunch of impatiens or petunias but a fragile looking field of Queen Anne's Lace. And it is.

Author Michael Ruggiero is an expert on garden design from the New York Botanical Gardens, and co-author Tom Christopher was one of the authors of another vastly enjoyable book called The Twenty Minute Gardener. Between the two of them they have managed to turn out a book on annuals unlike any I have seen before.

The book opens by straightening out what can be a confusing issue for people in colder areas of the country - exactly what is really an annual, and what is a perennial that just isn't hardy here. That settled, they define the scope of their book as incorporating any plant that will in fact give a flowering performance in the year in which it is planted.

They go on to describe the incredible number of useful roles these plants can play in a yard - everything from temporary accents to featured players - and even as fast cover-ups and temporary "backbone" plants. Lots of illustrations prove the point of these chapters.

In the section "planting with style, they began to worry me, as they launched into a discussion of "Planting with Style". While few of us are old enough to remember the days when carpet bedding was in style, we have certainly read enough about it (usually presented with high disdain) to be glad it faded from fashion. And one wonders how anyone could write a book about 20 minute gardens and then even come close to recommending these formal, stilted planting schemes. But they do, along with Gertrude Jekyll style borders, cutting gardens, those rampant with colored foliage and those that change their apparel every season. No one style is advocated over another - they are thrown out as some of the great possibilities that we can if we can just stop looking down our noses at the annual plant.

The book also includes excellent advice on planting and propagating annuals - in fact the final portion of the book, which lists "The Essential Annuals" is very useful in pointing out all the tricks and tips a gardener needs to be successful with even the most recalcitrant annual. I was a bit disappointed that they left out one of my favorites - osteospermum - but much can be forgiven men who include brugmansias as part of their definition of annuals.

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