Gardening with Native Plants of the South is a reference book along the lines of a plant encyclopedia - and is about as dry a read as the dictionary. If you live in the south and love gardening naturally - or want to work towards that instead of an English manor landscaping style Americans still persistently try to emulate despite living in a totally different climate and continent, this is a great reference tool with over 200 plants sorted by height (tall trees, short trees, shrubs, flowers, ground cover). I read the introductory material - then skimmed through the garden planning section and the "dictionary" section - before placing it in the gardening portion of my library where it will hang out as a little used reference until I start my shade garden (right now I am concentrating on the food portion of the garden) - at which point I will pour through it to fill in the bare, dry, caking area beneath my neighbors behemoth trees - most shade gardens are moist, so any help in that is going to be great.

I am rating the book at meeting its aim as an excellent reference source to encourage people to create more native environments. Each entry describes growing height, spacing, sun to shade, blooms, drainage, soil, root system, etc. and has (unfortunately) only one picture. For a really good encyclopedia (which would be triple the size and cost - and the introduction does indicate the author and publisher were aiming at something affordable for the shelf rather than exhaustive on the topic), I would have like a picture of the plant leaf, a picture of its flower and/or fruits, a spring, summer, fall, and winter picture so I can pick it out around my house. But I think those are dreams beyond my checkbook and will enjoy having this fairly workable solution.

The mark down on the book is its ability to cross-reference. Want dogwood - look for "flowering dogwood". Want honeysuckle - well that is "coral honeysuckle". Want a certain plant, you may need to look for its more popular cousin first. To me this isn't a big problem because each size section is manageable to page search, but it does impact the book's ability to be a good reference.