The year-round garden - Geoff Stebbings

The Year-Round Garden shows how to combine plants and create a beautiful year-round effect. Unlike anything else on the market, it suggests practical plant combinations that really do work across the seasons and lists hundreds of plants for different schemes. Your garden will be blooming - come frost or drought, rain or shine.

The opening section is broken down into seasons with individual profiles of excellent plants for each time of year. Every plant has a brief description and a list of companion plants that look good alongside the featured plant, or can prolong the interest when the main plant is out of season. For example, growing a spring-flowering climber through a deciduous shrub for spring and summer interest, or planting several perennials that flower consecutively across many months.

The middle section shows plant schemes in action, using sequential photography from specially planted gardens to demonstrate to the reader how mixing the profiled plants together really does prolong seasonal interest.

A detailed chart at the back of the book provides at-a-glance cultivation notes on all the profiled plants - from hardiness to soil requirements, optimum height to pruning requirements.

A practical book for all garden enthusiasts, The Year-Round Garden provides hundreds of planting ideas. It enables readers to plan their garden schemes and to enjoy their outside space 12 months of the year.