100 Best Plants for the Coastal Garden      What do you need to make a great garden? Simply the best plants you can buy, arranged in eye-catching combinations.  But what are the best plants? Steve knows how bewildering it can be to shop for plants at a garden centre. How do you make the right decision? Which rose is a great rose? What vines are star performers? Which perennials are the most reliable? He answers all these questions and more naming the 100 essential plants – trees, shrubs, roses, vines, perennials, bulbs – for the coastal garden.  Each plant has at least one outstanding quality: beautiful blooms, sensational foliage, marvelous form, or exquisite scent. With this book, you can confidently establish the botanical bones of your garden.

100 Best Plants for the Ontario Garden  What do you need to make a great garden? Simply the best plants you can buy, arranged in eye-catching combinations. But what are the best plants? Steve Whysall knows how bewildering it can be to shop for plants at a garden centre. Which is a great rose? What vines are star performers? Which perennials are the most reliable? He answers these questions and more, naming 100 essential plants – trees, shrubs, roses, vines, perennials, and bulbs-for the Ontario garden. Each plant has at least one outstanding quality: beautiful blooms, sensational foliage, marvelous form, or exquisite scent. With this book, you can confidently establish the botanical bones of your garden.

The Blooming Great Gardening Book Practical plant lists, inspiring insights, intelligent design tips, and plenty of down-to-earth advice on how to make your garden colourful, fragrant and simply lovely all year round. The Blooming Great Gardening Book contains all this and more. It is an invitation to embark on an adventure with nature that starts right in your own backyard. Gardening columnist Steve Whysall offers a comprehensive and accessible guide for all seasons. You’ll find in-depth sections on roses, perennials, trees, shrubs, bulbs, vines, annuals, evergreens and much more. The Blooming Great Gardening Book is designed to be an entertaining and eclectic package. Open the book to any page and you’ll find a wealth of information on absorbing gardening topics, everything from water gardens and patio plants to lawn care and winter containers.

Revised and fully updated, this is the second edition of the bestseller, 100 Best Plants for the Costal Garden.     Click here for full details.         The books are published by Whitecap Books, of North Vancouver, B.C.

This book is a month-by-month guide to the best plants to use to help gardeners create an ever-evolving landscape. With a little foresight and planning, you can create a seamless procession of flowers and foliage in your garden—as one plant fades, another will rise to take its place. If you want to know what to plant to guarantee that your garden will look fabulous in January, you can read about Daphne odora, Helleborus argutifolius, Sarcococca humilis and Viburnum tinus. For flowers in April, try Alchemilla mollis, Aquilegia vulgaris, Brunnera ‘Jack Frost’ and Rhododendron augustinii. To brighten the dark days of November, try planting Aucuba japonica, Camellia sasangua and Skimmia japonica.  Best Plant Picks is organized quite simply in a month-by-month sequence, featuring plants that either have great flowers, excellent foliage or attractive structure (or all three) during any given month. You can use this book in a variety of ways:  1. Look up a plant using the index and read all about that particular plant’s characteristics and how to make the best use of it in the garden. 2. Study your garden and decide what part of the year it seems to be missing a beat, then consult the appropriate months to find plant suggestions to solve your problem.

3. Or, simply use this book to plan a new garden, selecting top performance plants from each month to guarantee that your finished work has something of interest in every month of the year.    I began writing brief plant profiles in 1994 as a weekly mini-feature in the Vancouver Sun. It was originally called Plant of the Week and was intended as a concise profile of a plant in bloom.   The initial idea was to identify a particular plant, and explain the pros and cons of growing it, as well as tell the reader where to plant it, how to take care of it, how to prune it (if necessary), how to propagate it and where it could be bought. It was meant to be a “quick read”, but one packed with useful information.   By 2001, the name of the column changed to Flowering Now. In 2005, the name changed again to In Flower. By then, it had become clear that readers were mainly interested in three key pieces of information: What does the plant have to offer in terms of great flowers or foliage (or, in other words, why should I have it in my garden)? How big does it grow? And what conditions does it need to thrive? All of this information was eventually distilled into an even more compact format consisting of a few simple paragraphs and a photograph of the plant. Few readers, it seemed, were interested in knowing how to propagate plants; they were perfectly happy to leave that often difficult task to professional growers. In 2006, In Flower changed its name again to Plant Pick. The feature has since run every Friday on the front of the Sun’s At Home section. Over the years, I have written hundreds of these short plant profiles. The same plant was sometimes featured more than once, although the information changed to focus on a different aspect of the plant. Throughout this process, Sun readers got an almost encyclopedic amount of information about plants during the course of the year. Many people began clipping these mini-profiles and compiling their own scrapbooks. I hope The Vancouver Sun’s Best Plant Picks will give them a more complete, user-friendly and durable reference that will be useful for many years.