Tiffanie22's Reviews > New Naturalism: Designing and Planting A Resilient, Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden

I have heard Kelly D. Norris on many podcasts and always enjoy hearing him talk. So when I learned he had written this new book, I ordered it right away! The book is divided into two sections: Understanding Plants and Planting Palettes. The first covers some theory for the New Naturalism style of gardening, the second provides some guidelines to put the first into practice given certain conditions, and includes suggested plant lists for each layer of planting. I really enjoyed the drool-worthy photos throughout the book! They are beautiful and inspirational! They show many different ideas, from different parts of the world. Each garden seems to feature natives, near-natives and plants from other parts of the world that thrive in similar conditions and provide ecological benefit. Likewise, the plant suggestions supposedly do the same, however, all plant names are in latin, without common names present. This is my biggest hurdle with using this book...as a new gardener, I am not familiar with the latin names so I cannot picture any of the plants referenced. In order to make use of these lists, I will need to rely heavily on google. I will definitely use these lists as I continue on my quest to create an ecologically valuable landscape, and I really liked the matrix-structure-vignette approach to planting. While I really enjoyed this, I have knocked the score down to 3.5 from 4 due to the extra work it will take me to work through the plant lists.