Succulent Container Gardens, By Debra Lee Baldwin. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2010. $29.95 by Paula Szilard If you have hesitated filling your container gardens with succulents because you didn’t think they were pretty or colorful enough, this book may change your mind. Debra Lee Baldwin’s container plantings of succulents are absolutely stunning! Author of the highly praised book, Designing with Succulents, Ms. Baldwin gardens in southern California and shares her exceptional flair for design. She is very free in featuring the designs of others, but she always gives credit to the designers. This is, in the end what makes the book so visually interesting. She even includes several photographs of succulents from Denver Botanic Gardens and some designs from Timberline Gardens. The plants she works with, detailed in a section entitled, “Plant Palette,” are gorgeous tropical and subtropical dryland plants that unfortunately cannot overwinter outdoors in cold climates. She also uses a sprinkling of perennials that you can find in succulent gardens in northern areas, such as sedums, sempervivums, opuntias, and yuccas. Large urns planted with sansevierias and Sedum burrito The bulk of the plants she uses are crassulas, aeoniums, sedums, agaves, echeverias, aloes, euphorbias, gasterias, haworthias, kalanchoes, lithops, jatrophas, pachypodiums, sansevierias and senecios. She even makes use of synadeniums and bromeliads, such as cryptanthus and dyckias and describes companion plants that can drape over edges of pots or add height and interest, such as New Zealand flax. Lavender epidendrum orchids repeat the purple pink of Echeveria ‘Afterglow’ Ms. Baldwin has a gift for choosing the right containers for her compositions. In fact, some of the plantings have likely been inspired by the containers. It seems that in many arrangements, some feature of the container is repeated in the design, sometimes very subtly so. For instance, a container that has a surface that looks like stacked gray pebbles is paired with a planting of graptopetalums where the overlapping petals repeat the design on the pot. Another striking arrangement consists of three tall brownish avocado colored urns against a similar colored background, planted with tall dark green sansevierias, variegated horizontally with pale green stripes and accompanied by pale green burro’s tails cascading down the front. Simple, elegant and very beautiful! What looks like a framed tapestry of greens and grays hanging on a red wall is actually an arrangement of thousands of assorted sempervivum rosettes. You could call it a succulent trompe l’oeil, so handsomely textured that you want run your hands over it. These are truly all living sculptures. This book has everything a container gardener of succulents needs: a brief discussion of good design principles, how to choose containers appropriate to your design, information on the plants themselves, hundreds of examples of visually stunning designs in full color, information on plant care, overwintering, pests and finally, lists of succulents by size and other characteristics, such as colorful leaves, plants considered fillers and cascading plants to help the gardener find plants with desired characteristics. It’s hard to imagine how the book could be any better. Ms. Baldwin has done it all!

Succulent Container Gardens, By Debra Lee Baldwin.

Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2010. $29.95

by Paula Szilard

If you have hesitated filling your container gardens with succulents because you didn’t think they were pretty or colorful enough, this book may change your mind. Debra Lee Baldwin’s container plantings of succulents are absolutely stunning! Author of the highly praised book, Designing with Succulents, Ms. Baldwin gardens in southern California and shares her exceptional flair for design. She is very free in featuring the designs of others, but she always gives credit to the designers. This is, in the end what makes the book so visually interesting. She even includes several photographs of succulents from Denver Botanic Gardens and some designs from Timberline Gardens.

The plants she works with, detailed in a section entitled, “Plant Palette,” are gorgeous tropical and subtropical dryland plants that unfortunately cannot overwinter outdoors in cold climates. She also uses a sprinkling of perennials that you can find in succulent gardens in northern areas, such as sedums, sempervivums, opuntias, and yuccas.

Large urns planted with sansevierias and Sedum burrito

The bulk of the plants she uses are crassulas, aeoniums, sedums, agaves, echeverias, aloes, euphorbias, gasterias, haworthias, kalanchoes, lithops, jatrophas, pachypodiums, sansevierias and senecios. She even makes use of synadeniums and bromeliads, such as cryptanthus and dyckias and describes companion plants that can drape over edges of pots or add height and interest, such as New Zealand flax.

Lavender epidendrum orchids repeat the purple pink of Echeveria ‘Afterglow’

Ms. Baldwin has a gift for choosing the right containers for her compositions. In fact, some of the plantings have likely been inspired by the containers. It seems that in many arrangements, some feature of the container is repeated in the design, sometimes very subtly so. For instance, a container that has a surface that looks like stacked gray pebbles is paired with a planting of graptopetalums where the overlapping petals repeat the design on the pot. Another striking arrangement consists of three tall brownish avocado colored urns against a similar colored background, planted with tall dark green sansevierias, variegated horizontally with pale green stripes and accompanied by pale green burro’s tails cascading down the front. Simple, elegant and very beautiful! What looks like a framed tapestry of greens and grays hanging on a red wall is actually an arrangement of thousands of assorted sempervivum rosettes. You could call it a succulent trompe l’oeil, so handsomely textured that you want run your hands over it. These are truly all living sculptures.

This book has everything a container gardener of succulents needs: a brief discussion of good design principles, how to choose containers appropriate to your design, information on the plants themselves, hundreds of examples of visually stunning designs in full color, information on plant care, overwintering, pests and finally, lists of succulents by size and other characteristics, such as colorful leaves, plants considered fillers and cascading plants to help the gardener find plants with desired characteristics.

It’s hard to imagine how the book could be any better. Ms. Baldwin has done it all!