Complete Guide to Texas Gardening
Neil Sperry's Complete Guide to Texas Gardening, 2nd Edition is a beautiful book. Although it is used, it appears to be brand new and well worth the money. I would not hesitate to order from Amazon.com in the future. They are trustworthy in every way. This book arrived within three days after I ordered it! Thank you very much.
Good reference
I bought several books on Texas gardening as I just moved here. This is another great reference book.
Jack of all topics, master of none
I bought this book based on the stellar amazon reviews, temporarily forgetting that gardening book buyers seem to be a overly enthusiastic and entirely too forgiving crowd. As the review title suggests, this book tries to cover all topics (trees, shrubs, gardening, flowers, fruit and nut trees, lawns) and consequently doesn't say too much about anything in particular. Anyone who has already dabbled in any of these areas won't find anything new here. There are lots of color photos, but in keeping with the theme of the book, most of them are too small to be useful. I found myself squinting at the tree pictures trying to make out what the tree looked like. Buy this book if, say, you lived your entire life in New York City, just moved to Texas, and want to get started in gardening. Just about anyone else will be underwhelmed. A final pet peeve is that most modern gardeners are moving to strictly organic practices, while this author is still stuck in the bad old pesticide/herbicide world of yesteryear. It's hard to get good (i.e. useful/correct), in depth, gardening information. Stick to references that tackle only one subject at a time: trees, shrubs, vegetable gardens, flowers, fruit and nut trees, OR lawns for best results -- not all of the above with a little paragraph on each plant accompanied by postage stamp size (slight exaggeration) photos.
This book could have been useful if the author had just hired a better photographer and resigned himself to doubling the size/cost of the book with bigger pictures. For an example of how to do it the right way(tm), a good book on Texas plants is "Remarkable Plants of Texas" by Matt Warnock Turner. Compare the photos in Turner's book to this one to see what I'm talking about. "Remarkable Plants of Texas" is almost worth the cover price just for the gorgeous photography.
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