Landscaping With Fruit - Strawberry ground covers, blueberry hedges, grape arbors, and 39 other luscious fruits to make

Lee Reich is an author, lecturer, and consultant whose books include The Pruning Book and Weedless Gardening. Reich grows a broad assortment of fruit plants in his own garden, which has been featured in the New York Times, Organic Gardening, and Martha Stewart Living.

Information on fruit growing can be found readily, but books on landscaping with fruit are not that numerous. So it was with eagerness I awaited this one. Unfortunately, I was disappointed in the "landscaping" part. It is OK for big gardens, but virtually useless for those of us with more modest ones. A small section on dwarf varieties etc.. The impression left is that a "luscious landscape" is possible only with lots of land. In fact, the landscaping section is excerpted efficiently in Carleen Madigan's "The Backyard Homestead", which also is a bit more helpful for smaller gardens. Lee Reich's book is strongest when dealing with plant care & individual plant information.

Length: 2:31 Mins

I hope that by doing a video review, I am able to give you better glimpse inside the book. I really enjoyed this book and it's great advice on site planning. This book offers some great design elements and I was excited to start implementing more fruit plants in my garden. Yes, I said this book made me excited. It is really a fun read and an excellent resource.

Enjoy-

This book is not intended to be a complete compendium of every edible landscaping plant, but instead focuses on a small variety that the author thinks are particularly noteworthy. Many of them are lovely three or four seasons of the year, provide tasty fruit, and are relatively easy to care for. Reading through it, i discovered a great many plants i'd never heard of that sound quite delicious.

However, the author is relatively unconcerned about invasive species. He even lists blackberries as something to put in your garden, with an offhand mention of pruning to control growth. (Here in the pacific northwest, we don't worry about a zombie apocalypse much, because the blackberry bushes are stronger, faster, meaner, and more virulent than any zombie plague.) At least a few other plants also spread via suckers and underground runners, sometimes quite determinedly, but almost no emphasis is placed on it. A gardener following the recommendations in this book may end up with a property totally overrun by blackberries and maypop because they weren't able to keep up with the plants' precocious growing habits.

My advice to anyone looking to create their own edible landscape is to use this book as a starting point. Get some ideas of which plants sound like you'd like having them around, but then go check other sources. Make sure the plants you want to grow won't run you out of your home in a few seasons, or aren't disease-prone in your area. (For example, i was planning on planting some Juneberry trees until i talked to the people at my local garden center. They told me that i'd spend so much time fighting disease on my Juneberries that even if i managed a harvest, it wouldn't be worth it.)

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If you've got your heart set on growing some of the more obscure fruit listed in this book, but can't find reliable information, consider getting another book by the same author: Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden. It has a much smaller selection of fruits, but much more detailed information about each of them