For the plants themselves, and if you have shade, buy "The Complete Shade
Gardener", by George Schenk. I have no tips on a specific landscaping book,
though. Generally, I think it's a matter of gathering ideas from various
sources, and walking/biking a lot. That slows you down so you can pick up
ideas from other gardens. A few times, I've seen plants I liked, but
couldn't identify, and left a note and my phone number in someone's mailbox.
I've always gotten calls from the gardeners, who were happy to share
information.


"Pam - gardengal" wrote in message
news:ivxHc.56377$XM6.12822@attbi_s53...

"Jay" wrote in message
4.196...
We are moving into a newly built home soon.
I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on a really good landscaping
book or software.
We live in central new york
Thanks

This topic comes up with regularity on every gardening chat room or forum
I
have been acquainted with and the consensus is that no home landscape
design
software is particularly good. All seem to have various degrees of
unsuitablility, ranging from difficult to use, inadequate plant selection,
inability to project maturing landscape images or even incorporate actual
photos of your property. Most professionals, myself included, avoid them
all
like the plague, unless one has the funds and equipment to support a
really
good professional product like autocad.

Pencil and paper are generally suggested as the best way to go and you can
get help to develop your own drawn design plan through any number of home
landscaping how-to books. One that I have found to be useful and have
recommended before is Ortho's Creative Home Landscaping.. It will take you
through all the steps on how to measure and analyze your property for
various landscape considerations, layout the design on graph paper using
basic design elements and select appropriate plants. It also gives some
pretty good basic info on implementing the design and basic landscape
construction.

An alternative is hiring a landscape designer to develop the plan for you
to
implement yourself as time and money permit. Obviously some larger jobs
may
need to to be contracted out, but the majority of work involved in
implementing a new landscape design is simple labor, which pretty much any
homeowmer can accomplish. A designer is a very reasonable investment to
make
for the landscape of a new home - considering the effort and expense that
goes into new construction, why skimp when it comes to the landscape?

pam - gardengal