The Half-hour Gardener

This handbook demonstrates how you can create or maintain a beautiful garden, large or small, even if you are only able - or only want - to work on it for short periods of time. Anne Swithinbank discusses how to plan and use time in the garden most effectively, where to direct effort for best results and how essential work can be fitted into easy half-hour timeslots. She also describes 20 creative garden projects (such as making a small herb garden, creating a colourful border or planting a container), none of which takes more than 30 minutes. The book also includes a catalogue of over 100 best-value decorative plants that largely look after themselves.

Table of Contents:
Planting basics; seasonal maintenance; planting projects; easy-care plants; the living garden.

About the Author :
Anne Swithinbank is one of Britain's best-known gardeners, broadcasters and garden writers. She trained at Kew and was Glasshouse Supervisor at the RHS Garden at Wisley. She has presented many popular television gardening programmes, including Bloom, Gardens of the Caribbean, and Gardeners' World. She is also a regular panellist on Gardeners' Question Time. A prolific gardening correspondent for a number of national magazines and newspapers, she is also the author of six books, including The Conservatory Garden (for Frances Lincoln).

Review :
Well-known garden presenter and writer Anne Swithinbank gives an excellent new take on gardening for those short of time. Not half an hour a week or even half an hour a day but half an hour whenever the time presents itself to carry out a task in the garden. A whole new philosophy is found within these pages, requiring the reader to take several steps back and not look at the garden as one enormous, on-going chore, but to regard it with a more relaxed mind. Rushing around trying to do everything at once results in things being half done. Focussing on accomplishable tasks such as sorting out an overgrown shrub is easily achieved in half an hour and will induce a sense of well-being at a job well done at the end of it. Small transformations such as grouping a collection of pots together can give a whole new look to a corner of the garden in half an hour or less. Planting a bag of tulips in the Autumn for a Spring display, will repay you a hundred times over in terms of time when they flower. Planting up a dark corner with ferns will reap long-term benefits with hardly any time exerted at all. Anne aims to help the reader create a garden that will require little maintenance and can be enjoyed rather than laboured over. Her solid, down-to-earth advice is reassuring and she positively encourages neglect in some instances thus assuaging the guilt. An excellent book for those wanting to relax in the garden whilst at the same time having a visual feast that requires little or no maintenance.