English Cottage Gardening: For American Gardeners, Revised Edition

Very pleased with this purchase from a small seller through Amazon. Book was in great condition and very fast shipping. Arrived well packaged and undamaged.As for the book itself, also 5 stars. It’s full of information, ideas and suggestions for creating your cottage/small garden, as well as many pictures for inspiration. Many chapters are devoted to a particular cottage garden, explaining how and why the owner designed and planted things certain ways. There is also a section recommending different plants for cottage gardeners. If you want ideas and inspiration, this is a good book for the beginner. If you want specific garden plans and layouts, however, this probably isn’t the book you are looking for.

I am planning a cottage garden at my new-to-me 77 year old retirement home in TN, so when I saw this book, I had to have it. It is filled with great ideas, lovely photos, and best of all, the names (latin and everyday names) of the flowers in each picture. I am drooling over the gardens pictures, and planning what I can grown here in my yard.Like all books of this kind, it was written a few years ago, but it is an excellent resource for those people who like a little organized chaos in their yard and flowerbeds.

Sitting here on my steps with my phone, shaking my head at my inability to add any more positive, descriptive words to build any of the reviews. Lovely. Dreamy. Soothing. Delicately magnificent.I think I’ve read about 5 percent of the text, and most of that to get the plants’ scientific names. The content IS good, and one day I will get it read. And then I’ll read it again.- While the title does not say “garden planning”, I had hoped a plan or two was in there. HOWEVER, with graph or tracing paper it is easy to outline a photo, and then note the corresponding plant name, which is what I’ve done, from this book and others. The detailed descriptions for each photo more than compensate for my expectations of plans.

Good photos

If you like this style of gardening you can NOT go wrong with this book. It is just jammed full of information and wonderful photos. It also has contacts for supplies, although as the book is not a recent print I can't be sure how available those sources still are. If you want to just look at a great book and enjoy, it's a great book. If you want to create a garden that has this look you can do it with this book. I sat down with the book and my gardening catalogues and am excited about putting some "English Cottage" in my gardens.

Very nice book. Not particularly reader-friendly as a "how to" book though. Beautiful pictures and plenty of gardens that inspire me.

This is a garden book to keep by the side of your easy chair. Every time I pick it up, I start reading and enjoy the straight forward descriptions and plant recommendations and flower combinations.I've made the mistake of ordering a book or two from the internet only to find that "English Gardening" is all about estate gardening. Lovely, but I don't own an estate. Margaret Hensel has traveled through England and brought back practical advice about how to get the look of a small, intimate garden outside English cottages not castles.It's an easy read of information about what makes a cottage garden have the charm and intimacy that I think of when I envision my own plot of land. There are diagrams of the landscapes as well.There's encouragement about what makes a English cottage garden rather than the usual approach that it's not possible to create this kind of garden outside of England. So many books fall short because they begin with this premise and this leads to how to add tropical plants or other such nonsense.

Could have been a very nice book but the photo finishes were dull, making the book look cheap.