Cold Climate Gardening

Nan with her two alpacas, Duncan and Daniel. Photo by Rob Cardillo, used with permission.Yesterday I reviewed Fallscaping by Stephanie Cohen and Nancy Ondra. Knowing Nan is a fellow garden blogger, I thought it would be interesting to learn more about her as a writer and gardener.

This is your second book co-authored with Stephanie Cohen. How did you two originally come to work together?

I’ve known Stephanie since the early 90s, when I was working at Rodale and had to interview her for a perennials book we were putting together at the time. Several years ago, she was interested in doing a book on perennial garden design and suggested that we work together, so we approached Storey Publishing (with whom I’d already done Grasses), and they were open to the idea. That turned into The Perennial Gardener’s Design Primer, which was published in 2005.

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Inspiring Ideas and Photos Take the Autumn Garden to the Next Level
I’d read several books by Piet Oudolf and by Wolfgang Oehme, but I never really “got” the fall garden until I read Fallscaping, by Nancy Ondra and Stephanie Cohen. Somehow those two American women made gardening in the fall accessible to me in a way that those two foreign-born men did not.

This doesn’t really surprise me, as I was impressed with how down-to-earth and practical The Perennial Gardener’s Design Primer, their first collaboration, was. They leave no class of plant behind in their quest to help you maximize the beauty from your fall garden, and provide you with dozens of design strategies. And if their words don’t convince you, the photographs by Rob Cardillo will totally wow you. Take a look at this combination of pink muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris) and Arkansas bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii).

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It’s great fun to compose wishlists of seeds to try and plants to grow, but, you know, you have to put those plants somewhere. Figuring out where to put them is called the design process. I’ve come across two books lately that help.

The Perennial Gardener’s Design Primer by Stephanie Cohen and Nancy J. Ondra provides in one volume the kind of information it took me several years of reading gardening magazines to acquire. If, like me, you’re a magazine addict of long-standing, you probably won’t learn much, though you’ll be reminded of an awful lot you might have been on the verge of forgetting.

The biggest problem with most introductory books is they are superficial and boring. Cohen and Ondra manage to avoid both.

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