Grow Wild!: Low-Maintenance, Sure-Success, Distinctive Gardening with Native Plants

by Lorraine Johnson, Andrew Leyerle (Photographer)

Celebrates the aesthetic triumphs of the trend toward native plant gardening, offering readers the tools necessary to create places of natural beauty in their own gardens.

Genres: Gardening

160 pages, Hardcover

First published December 30, 1997

Reviews

[Carol Kean]

This is the rare book that I love so much, I've bought a dozen copies now to give away to friends, hoping to inspire them to give up on the suburban lawn and try imaginative, colorful, eco-friendly solutions like Lorraine Johnson's "Grow Wild" with native species. Forget watering the Kentucky bluegrass on your pristine, chemically weed-free lawn. Leave those boring landscape shrubs at the nursery. Better yet, get the nurseries to stop selling invasive non-natives.

I love the chapter on moss gardening for those shady patchs of lawn where grass won't grow.

I love everything in this book--it's my Bible!--and I want to make converts of homeowners and guerilla gardeners everywhere. Luckily, in the years since I first discovered "Grow Wild," the idea of pollinator gardens started trending. Let's hope we see more of those from now on, and less of the manicured golf-course-clean-and-green lawns.

[Alyssa Bohon]

A dip and skim library read. Pretty pictures and plenty of interesting plant lists. I would have enjoyed it more if the pro-wild tone had been a little less aggressive in places.

A writer ought, of course, to be passionate about her subject, but the native plant fervor was a bit too hardcore for my perspective. I want to enjoy and protect native plants as God's good gifts, as well as to love and enjoy the people (made in his image) who are still clueless about them. From a purely evolutionary perspective the desire to protect a species can naturally become intense and polarizing. I don't want to go there. But I do want to grow some New Jersey tea and foamflower...

[Cheryl]

More inspirational than informative