Deckscaping: Gardening and Landscaping on and Around Your Deck - Hardcover

With DECKSCAPING, learn to landscape on and around your deck. Landscaping and planting techniques help create the feeling that the deck is surrounded by the garden while hiding the deck's unsightly undercarriage. Add structure and privacy to the deck by building a lattice-covered pergola and growing climbing vines on it for shade. Containers planted with flowers, herbs, or vegetables bring the garden, with its fragrances, butterflies, birds, and wildlife, right up onto the deck. Running low on space? Attach hanging baskets and planter boxes to the railing. What you plant around your deck is just as important as what you plant around your house.

In addition to teaching landscaping and planting techniques, DECKSCAPING provides decorating tips on furniture, ornaments, and water features that strengthen the link between indoor and outdoor rooms. Homeowners will also learn how to evaluate a deck, analyze its usefulness and effectiveness, and identify options to improve it so that it is comfortable, safe, and appealing.

When surrounded by shrubs and small trees, perennials and annuals, ornamental grasses and vines, your deck becomes an appealing link between your home and yard. In this book, you'll find everything you need to know to create your dream deck environment. Barbara Ellis offers dozens of creative ideas and fail-proof techniques.

Long-blooming flowers, fruit-bearing shrubs, and gracefully drifting grasses offer fragrance and color while attracting visits from butterflies and hummingbirds.

Plant-packed containers grouped on a deck convey a special feeling of abundance, and they instantly create a gardenlike feel.

Flowering vines trained over a sturdy arbor create an island of welcome shade. Flowers and foliage spilling over railings and covering a trellised wall or arbor provide a sense of privacy.

Count on Barbara Ellis to pick up on just what the American deck needs. Deckscaping shows us how to turn our own bland (or cluttered!) space into a delightful, usable room that seamlessly joins our indoor dTcor with our garden landscape. With so many good ideas, I can't wait to get started! (Frances Tenenbaum, Editor, Taylor's Guide to Gardening)

Barbara Ellis offers a whole new approach to making this outdoor living space one of the most attractive areas of the home landscape. (Lewis and Nancy Hill, authors of The Lawn and Garden Owner's Manual, Daylilies, Pruning Made Easy, and Secrets of Plant Propagation)