Western Garden Book - Ultimate Guide to Gardening in the Western US | Best Plants, Landscaping Tips & Care Advice for Home Gardeners" 使用场景: Perfect for beginner and experienced gardeners in the Western U.S., ideal for planning home gardens, selecting drought-resistant plants, and creating beautiful landscapes.

I am a landscaper and use the most recent Western Garden Book constantly as a reference. One of the small complaints about it is that it is hard for people who don't know plants to get any idea of how they look from the pictures in the old Sunset books.This latest 2007 edition improves that greatly. Every page has color, and there are tons of helpful illustrations to show beginners how to propagate, prune, and do a number of other basic gardening tasks. There are a lot more photos than in the old book, and they are vivid, larger than before, and are much better at illustrating how the plant really looks.Another thing that is neat about this edition is that the plant index has been eliminated. You just go to the alphabetical listing of what you are looking for, and if you have the wrong name or a common name, a short listing will direct you to the correct page. The last version had a plant index as well as a vocabulary index, and so I'd often be flipping through the wrong index - but this book eliminates that totally. Incorporating the index into the rest of the book makes things a lot more intuitive to find. And fruits and veggies are listed by their common names, which is nice. I know when most people think of an apple, they don't think to connect that with the genus Malus.All the plant lists, such as for deer-resistant plants or other special considerations, have been revised and updated, and there are still glossy photographs of many of the listed plants.Even if you have the last edition available, this book is well worth the $23 to upgrade. It is really so much more helpful than before, and is a real pleasure to read.