Rhs How To Grow Practically Everything

This is the best how-to-do-gardening book I've come across. It is very comprehensive for beginners like me with inspiring photographs plus short and easy explanations and directions. The Contents page subtitles Gardening Basics, Beautiful Beds, Creative Containers, Structural Features, Fruit and Vegetables, Wildlife Gardening, Plants for your Home and Plant Care and there is a good list of suppliers at the back. We have a large garden and I'm no gardener but this book offers instructions for gardening projects in simple terms, listing what you'll need, when's the best time to do it and roughly how long it will take to do - a bit like a recipe book. So now I can plan an afternoon at the weekend or an hour after teatime and do some creative pots, or build a raised bed or transform a boggy patch at the end of the lawn into an attractive feature without being overwhelmed by the entire garden. Each of its hundreds of projects lists recommended plants and seeds easy to locate in any... Read more

I really like this book. I've only recently come to gardening in the last year and this was the first book I bought. I have since bought a number of others, but this is the one I keep coming back to. It's lovely to dip into, flick through or while away an hour or two with. I tend to read this and then take my ideas from it. For example, I read about sweet peas last week and now there is a seed tray with seedlings waiting to be planted out at home. You can take it a step at a time or try everything in one go. I even wanted to pot my xmas tree outside and despite searches and looking through other books I could find nothing on how best to do it. And then I stumbled across the right page in this book and all became clear. Lovely book. Strongly recommended.

A key word that is buried away in the title is "projects".

This book is full of gardening projects that you can do - covering almost any project you can imagine working on in your garden - from water features, to vegetable gardens, to achieving a particular look, or success with particular types of plants.

Very inspiring if you're looking to get started with particular projects - I'm not sure though how much other gardening knowledge and experience is needed...