Grow Wild: Native-Plant Gardening in Canada and Northern United States

by Lorraine Johnson

Native plant gardening is a landscape trend that has taken hold in North America as gardeners search for a truly indigenous style of gardening. Attractive to both a new generation of gardener who grew up in an era of environmental concerns and to the established green thumb who is looking for something new, naturalistic gardening offers a low maintenance, sure success and distinctive style of gardening.

From a tiny urban forest in Vancouver to a beautiful wildflower garden on the prairies,

Grow Wild! celebrates the aesthetic triumphs of this newly emerging trend with over 100 colour photographs of gorgeous native plant gardens and wildflowers. Twenty inspiring and successful native plant gardens across northern North America are profiled, from the coastal plains of British Columbia through the central prairies and to the forests of the eastern seaboard.

Grow Wild! also includes native plant lists, a resource directory that details native plant gardens worth visiting in each ecological region, as well as practical advice on how to create a stunning native plant garden. Laced with quirky humour and a down-to-earth perspective, Grow Wild! offers gardeners the tools they need to create beautiful gardens that take their cue from nature.

Genres: Gardening

154 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 1997

Reviews

[Carol Kean · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 3 out of 5]

More inspirational than informative