Cacti & Succulents

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Succulent Container Gardens: Design Eye-Catching Displays with 350 Easy-Care Plants

Debra Lee Baldwin

With their colorful leaves, sculptural shapes, and simple care, succulents are beautiful yet forgiving plants for pots. If grown in containers, these dry-climate jewels—which include but are not limited to cacti—can be brought indoors in winter and so can thrive anywhere in the world. 

In this inspiring compendium, the popular author of Designing with Succulents provides everything beginners and experienced gardeners need to know to create stunning container displays of exceptionally waterwise plants. The extensive palette includes delicate sedums, frilly echeverias, cascading senecios, edgy agaves, and fat-trunked beaucarneas, to name just a few. Easy-to-follow, expert tips explain soil mixes, overwintering, propagation, and more.

Define your individual style as you effectively combine patterns, colors, textures, and forms. Discover how top designers interpret the dramatic options, in ideas ranging from exquisite plant-and-pot combinations to extraordinary topiaries and bonsai. Expand your repertoire with plump-leaved plants that resemble pebbles, stars, and undersea creatures. Short on space? Create vertical gardens and hanging baskets, and use daisylike rosettes in wall displays.

Each of the more than 300 photographs offers an inspiring idea. A-to-Z descriptions cover 350 of the best succulents, plus companion plants. Whether your goal is a gorgeous potted garden for a sunny windowsill or outdoor living area—or simply making great gifts—this is a comprehensive primer for creating vibrant, living works of art.

Designing with Succulents

Debra Lee Baldwin

Succulent plants offer dazzling possibilities for garden design and require only minimal maintenance to remain lush and alluring year round. Featuring the work of more than 50 professional garden designers and creative homeowners, this complete design compendium is as practical as it is inspirational. Lavishly illustrated with over 300 photographs, it gives design and cultivation basics for paths, borders, slopes, and containers; hundreds of succulent plant recommendations; and descriptions of 90 easy-care, drought-tolerant companion plants. Beginners and experienced designers, landscapers, and collectors alike will find what they need to visualize, create, and nurture the three-dimensional work of art that is the succulent garden.

Hardy Succulents: Tough Plants for Every Climate

Gwen Moore Kelaidis

From agaves to ice plants, from sedums to sempervivums, hardy succulent plants bring beauty, versatility, and intrigue to perennial gardens in every hardiness zone. No longer reserved for desert climates, succulents can offer extraordinary color, texture, durability, and ease of care to gardens everywhere. Hardy Succulents gives gardeners everything they need to know to select, grow, and maintain these dazzling, low-fuss plants. With step-by-step growing instructions, practical care tips, creative ideas for use, and stunning photographs from acclaimed garden photographer Saxon Holt, this book is both beautiful and practical — one that will appeal to novices and experienced gardeners alike.

Complete Book of Cacti & Succulents

Terry Hewitt

The Complete Book of Cacti & Succulents features the history, cultivation, and imaginative use of more than 300 plants -- in step-by-step color stages. This is a feast of in-depth information and eye-catching photography. DK's new line of paperback titles combines all the qualities of its hardcovers with the advantages of the soft cover format. Each of these already popular books will now be available to a large new readership who will delight in the essential elements of every DK title: clarity, educational value, and visual appeal.

Agaves: Living Sculptures for Landscapes and Containers

Greg Starr

Gardeners and garden designers are having a love affair with agaves. It's easy to see why—they're low maintenance, drought-tolerant, and strikingly sculptural, with an astounding range of form and color. Many species are strikingly variegated, and some have contrasting ornamental spines on the edges of their leaves. Fabulous for container gardening or in-the-ground culture, they combine versatility with easy growability.

In Agaves, plant expert Greg Starr profiles 75 species, with additional cultivars and hybrids, best suited to gardens and landscapes. Each plant entry includes a detailed description of the plant, along with its cultural requirements, including hardiness, sun exposure, water needs, soil requirements, and methods of propagation. Agaves can change dramatically as they age and this comprehensive guide includes photos showing each species from youth to maturity—a valuable feature unique to this book.

The Timber Press Guide to Succulent Plants of the World: A Comprehensive Reference to More than 2000 Species

Fred Dortort

The plants are organized into 28 intuitively logical groups, such as succulent euphorbias, mesembryanthemums, bulbs, succulent trees, aloes, agaves, and haworthias. Each entry includes information on the plant's native habitat, its cultivation requirements, and its horticultural potential. As useful to novice growers as to collectors and those with an existing interest in succulents, this will be the standard reference for years to come.

The Gardener's Guide to Cactus: The 100 Best Paddles, Barrels, Columns, and Globes

Scott Calhoun

At last: a book that shows readers just how easy, hardy, and rewarding cactus can be for everyone — not just specialists. Succulent plant expert Scott Calhoun picks 100 of the best cactus available and shows how they can make striking additions to your garden or serve as dazzling container specimens.

Whether you want striking form, gorgeous flowers, or a low-maintenance plant for a spot that needs little or no supplementary water, you'll find it in this friendly, informative, eye-catching guide.

  • Detailed descriptions of the 100 best cactus for gardens
  • Stunning photos
  • Expert advice on planting and care
  • How to show cactus
  • Tips for growing cactus in containers
  • Best tools and planting media
  • How to identify and avoid pests
  • Helpful lists of spineless, culinary, and scented cactus

Cacti and Succulents: An Illustrated Guide to the Plants and their Cultivation (Crowood Aviation S.)

Graham Charles

An essential guide to cacti and other succulents, featuring 420 color photos and a wealth of information on the plants and their cultivation. Beautifully illustrated and highly accessible, this guide is both an instructive practical manual and a rich source of reference. More than 250 different species or genera and their natural habitats are profiled and illustrated. Topics include: the unique nature of succulents; their natural environment; history, classification, and nomenclature; watering, feeding, general care, and propagation; and pests and diseases. Lavishly illustrated, this is an indispensable guide for growers and enthusiasts.
 
Graham Charles is a National Cactus and Succulent Society judge and lecturer.

Cactus of Arizona Field Guide (Arizona Field Guides)

Nora Bowers, Rick Bowers, Stan Tekiela

Learn about and identify cactus in Arizona! Full-page photos and descriptions make this the best guide to Arizona's cacti. Shape icons help narrow your search, and more photos per cactus than any other field guide makes visual identification quick and easy. Range maps and close-ups of spines, flowers and fruit aid in identification. This is the field guide for you!

Guide to Succulents of Southern Africa

Gideon Smith, Neil Crouch

Twenty-five per cent of southern African flora is succulent in nature, and a remarkable forty per cent of the world's succulent plants occur in South Africa. The book will highlight the diversity of succulents that occur in the region with special emphasis on the larger groups - mesems (vygies) and aloes.

The book covers approximately 250 individual species, focusing on the most common and most interesting, and each entry features a photograph and distribution map.

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