Books: Flower Combos for Easy Design

It's always the old conundrum:  what to plant next to what.  Make your life easy and pick up a copy of The Flower-Powered Garden: Supercharge Your Borders and Containers with Bold, Colourful Plant Combinations (Timber Press, 2018).  British author Andy Vernon, a writer and horticultural consultant in the UK, offers 15 super-charged combos of annuals and perennials that can be used in either containers or gardens.

Chocolate Limes is a takeoff on sweets and candybars ... including dark and white chocolates, shades of cocoa, caramel and coffee, and for the hard, lime-colored candies, hues of green and burgundy.  Think Heuchera 'Green Spice', Hydrangea paniculata 'Little Lime', Dahlia 'Mexican Black' and Verbena 'Babylon White', just to mention a few.

There are gorgeous bold colors in Mexicolour, and lovely violets and blues in Seaside Chic.

Each page has photos of several plants that would all look great together in a container, bed, or border, just take your pick.  It makes the guesswork of plant combinations very easy indeed.

Vernon admits he's a plant "addict" obsessed with color.  His book will turn you into one as well.