The Bold and Brilliant Garden

As a jobbing gardener I bought this for a client so that we could share ideas on colour, placement and clever planting. He has no gardening knowledge but is keen to input and has found lots of useful info in the very well presented, reasonably priced hardback book. We have completely overhauled his garden, changing the design and aspect, and he even hopes to take part in the National Open Gardens scheme next year. So from humble beginnings Sarah Raven's book on colourful, year round gardening has been a great success. I'll be buying it for all my clients from now on. Thanks.

For a book about bold colour, and with such a great photographer illustrating it, something has gone badly wrong with the printing - the images are too saturated and blurry and the text is too faint. I compared two paperback copies and they were both the same. Gardening books are usually gorgeous and inspiring, this looked like a colour photocopy. Returned

This book will teach you how to use bold colours in the garden to the greatest advantage. It is packed with lots of cultivars of perennials with the most striking colours and plenty of inspirational ideas on combining plants. Mere browsing through the book will amaze you and get you addicted to charm of flowers.

Sarah's book, and the subsequent visit to her house and gardens has prompted me to spend many happy days shopping, hunting down and planting dozens of perennials and seeds for next year. Hopefully these will encourage insects and birds to visit the gardens of my town house, front and back, something so simple and effective that I can offer, to help our struggling environment. And I just can't wait to see the palette of colours when all these gorgeous variety begin to bloom. What an amazing ambassador and wonderful artist she is.

I'm a novice gardener and was hoping to find a book that would help me create or design a garden from scratch. This was not it