The Heirloom Flower Gardens: Rediscovering and Designing With Classic Ornamentals

Favorite old varieties of plants are a lot like old friends: easy-going, dependable, and enduring. Even with all of the dazzling new flowers that appear every spring in catalogs and garden centers, most gardeners still treasure those time-honored plants that have proven their worth over many years and earned an abiding place in our hearts.

Heirloom Flower Gardens celebrates more than 300 classic ornamental plants, and explores their uses in the landscape and the home. This charming and influential book is now back in print, and even better than before. It features more than 25 additional plant portraits, as well as expanded information on growing, landscaping, and preserving flowers and herbs for culinary and craft use. Other new sections provide information on creating period plantings and designing specialty or theme gardens.

Author JoAnn Gardner defines the word "heirloom" broadly, and includes a wide variety of plants—flowers, herbs, shrubs, and vines—that were introduced to North America between 1600 and the 1950s. All of them have a simplicity and elegance that make them valuable additions to the home landscape. Most are also known for their hardiness and undemanding natures. Sections on growing under each plant portrait give specific instructions that will ensure success.

Even the common names of these plants sound poetic and evocative, from the airy foliage of love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena) to the delightfully descriptive flower known as policeman’s-helmet (Impatiens glandulifera). From foxglove to primrose, bee balm to sneezewort, these heirloom flowers offer a living link to our rich garden heritage, and they exhibit a grace and beauty that never grows old.