Random House Book of Perennials

"This is a very handy book. There are a lot of books about perennials for your garden, but I use this book at home and I am sure all of the gardeners here at the New York Botanical Garden use it as well. I probably use it more than any other book on this list and the great thing about it is that it arranges perennials for your flower garden in order of when they flower in the season. So it starts off with hellebores because they start so very early in spring. That is exciting and they are important for a perennial garden. There are pages and pages of hellebores, you can find any hellebore you could ever want to grow, and so it continues through the year listing the perennials as they flower through the season. You get through Volume One, which takes you to midsummer, then you move on to Volume Two and you end up going all the way through to the end of the growing season and finish with ferns. Yes, exactly. You can compare your own established garden with this book and if in the middle of summer you don’t have enough colour, it will show you what you may need."