We've got the Prairies Covered: Groundcovers and Vines for the Prairies

Just released - the latest in the Fifth House Prairie Gardening Series is

Best Groundcovers & Vines For The Prairies

"This is a long-needed reference book and it couldn't have come from a more knowledgeable and reliable source. Everyone involved in creating gardens in this climate should have this book in their collection." - Wendy Mackie, former Director of Assiniboine Park Conservatory in Winnipeg

Groundcovers and vines are among the most useful hardy plants for the challenging prairie region, but until now gardeners have lacked a prairie-specific source of information about these versatile plants. Sara Williams and Hugh Skinner draw on their years of prairie gardening experience to provide landscaping and cultivation advice, along with comprehensive descriptions and photographs of the very best groundcovers and vines for the area.

Hugh Skinner has a B.S.A. in horticulture from the University of Manitoba and has been active in the nursery industry for thirty years. He grows a wide variety of hardy plants and maintains a large collection of trees in the Frank Skinner Arboretum near Roblin, Manitoba, the result of ninety years of plant collecting, testing, and breeding, first started by his father, Frank Skinner. His garden is home to a wide variety of vines and groundcover plants.

Sara Williams has retired as the horticultural specialist at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the co-author of Perennials for the Plains and Prairies and author of the award-winning Creating the Prairie Xeriscape and In a Cold Land: Saskatchewan's Horticultural Pioneers. She holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in horticulture from the University of Saskatchewan.

18948568059 x 6, 240 pages, Trade PaperRegional Gardening / Horticulture

$24.99 CAD http://www.fitzhenry.ca/detail.aspx?ID=10003

tip from
Best Groundcovers & Vines For The Prairies

Unifying Shrub Beds
Groundcovers unify shrub beds and borders, especially when these beds are newly planted and the shrubs are still small and seemingly very far apart. Select a groundcover that ties the permanent plantings together and visually complements rather than competes with them. If the shrub bed or border contains dwarf evergreen shrubs, consider a groundcover with a very delicate, airy appearance, such as lady’s mantle, or one with neutral silver or green foliage, such as thyme, speedwells such as Veronica whitleyii and V. pectinata, pussytoes, snow-in-summer, or ‘Silver Brocade’ artemisia.
Deciduous shrubs are more variable than evergreens and it may take more care to select an appropriate groundcover that complements both foliage and flowers. Gray pussytoes or snow-in-summer are neutral and work well with most shrubs. For deciduous shrubs with gray foliage, consider bright green dwarf phlox or blue-purple ‘Chocolate Chip’ bugleweed.
If the bed is small, you may wish to use only one species of groundcover for the entire bed. In a larger bed or border, think about using several different groundcovers, each within its own grouping.

Groundcovers for Unifying Shrub Beds
Ajuga reptans (carpet bugle, bugleweed)
Alchemilla spp. (lady’s mantle)
Antennaria spp. (pussytoes)
Bergenia cordifolia (heart-leaved bergenia, pigsqueak)
Campanula cochlearifolia (dwarf bellflower, fairy thimble)
Cerastium tomentosum (snow-in-summer)
Dianthus spp. (pinks)
Fragaria x ‘Pink Panda’ (‘Pink Panda’ strawberry)
Lamiastrum galeobdolon (yellow archangel)
Lamium maculatum (spotted dead nettle)
Lysimachia nummularia (creeping Jenny, moneywort)
Nepeta spp. (catmint)
Omphalodes verna alba (creeping forget-me-not)
Sedum spp. (stonecrop)
Thymus spp. (thyme)
Veronica spp. (speedwell)
Junipers on public walkway
FH Groundcovers book.indb 12 10/16/06 12:01:10 PM
Vinca herbacea (herbaceous periwinkle)
Viola canadensis (Western Canada violet, wood violet)
Waldsteinia ternata (Siberian barren strawberry)



Contents of

Best Groundcovers & Vines For The Prairies

Acknowledgements ii

Chapter One
INTRODUCTION 1

Chapter Two
GROUNDCOVERS AND VINES IN THE LANDSCAPE

• Designing by Habitat 3
  Designing by Function 6
  Groundcovers 6
  Vines 11

Chapter Three
PURCHASE, ESTABLISHMENT, AND MAINTENANCE OF GROUNDCOVERS AND VINES 27

• Getting Ready 27
  How Do Groundcovers Cover Ground? 27
  Preparing the Planting Site 28
  Spacing 29
  Purchase and Planting 30
  Groundcovers 30
  Vines 32
  Propagating Groundcovers and Vines 32
  Seed 33
  Suckers, Divisions, and Layers 33
  Hardwood and Softwood Cuttings 35
  Maintaining Groundcovers and Vines 36
  Mulching 37
  Pruning 37
  Fertilizing 38
  Pest and Disease Control 39

Chapter Four
GROUNDCOVERS AND VINES FOR PRAIRIE GARDENS 41

• Groundcovers 44
  Vines 195

Glossary 213

Index 221

Also by Hugh Skinner and Sara Williams
Best Trees and Shrubs for the Prairies
http://www.fitzhenry.ca/detail.aspx?ID=7866

How the West Was Written: The Life and Times of James H. Gray

In a Times Colonist review last Sunday, April 22, 2007, Dave Obee states, "Brennan's work might help to bring Gray into the national limelight, something that is long overdue. After that, who knows? Some easterners might decide to read Red Lights on the Prairies. They could do much worse."

The sentiment running through Obee's piece is reflective of Christopher Moore's analysis in the February 07 issue of The Beaver, in a feature entitled REREADING JAMES GRAY. Moore states, "Pierre Berton lived in Toronto. James Gray lived in Calgary. When it comes to a national reputation, is geography destiny?" Good question, Christopher Moore.

Brian Brennan is a writer of books and periodical articles about the history and the colourful personalities of Western Canada.
His latest is
How The West Was Written
The Life and Times of James H. Gray
James H. Gray was the first Canadian social historian to tackle such previously taboo subjects as the sex lives and boozing habits of the early settlers. His books were on the national and Toronto Star bestseller lists before those of Pierre Berton and have since become classics of Canadian literature. Gray's Red Lights on the Prairies stunned readers with its straight-forward approach to prostitution on the prairies and was named one of the one hundred most important Canadian books of all time by the Literary Review of Canada.

For more about the book and to purchase, see
http://www.fitzhenry.ca/detail.aspx?ID=9912

Foreword
I met James Gray in the spring of 1995. I had just written new introductions to several of his books that were being republished and he wanted to treat me to lunch at Calgary’s Petroleum Club. He was legally blind by then, and I found him holding court at the club entrance, recognizing old friends by their voices and getting caught up on the latest gossip.

Twenty years earlier, as a fresh history student embarking on graduate studies, I would have sniffed at Gray and his work for not being scholarly, not being theoretical enough. After all, academic writing was serious stuff. But, as I gradually learned during my university career, that’s exactly why Gray enjoyed such a popular following. Unlike the monographs produced by most professional historians, his books were deliberately pitched at the general reader. It really was not a fair contest.

Gray turned to writing out of desperation. In a letter in December 1994, prepared on an old typewriter that had become a challenge for him to operate because of his eyesight, he confided to me, “The most important fact to be understood about me is I am a product totally of the Great Depression.” He then went on to explain that in 1931, after “a five-month detour through a T.B. sanatorium,” he and his young family found themselves “utterly destitute on unemployment relief living, eating, sleeping, and cooking in a single room in a slum boarding house.”

It was at this low point that Gray decided to become a journalist. Through sheer persistence, he landed a job as a reporter with the Winnipeg Free Press in 1935. Soon, he was recruited as an editorial writer. But the Depression still haunted him, so in 1946, while working as a member of the Ottawa press gallery, he wrote The Winter Years, a personal account of the dirty thirties in the urban West.

For a number of reasons, the manuscript would not appear in print for another twenty years. But when The Winter Years was finally published in 1966, it was an instant national best-seller. It also marked the beginning—at age sixty when most people start to contemplate retirement—of Gray’s prolific writing career. Over the next twenty-six years, he produced twelve books, many of which have become classics.

Gray’s trademark was an accessible and lucid style, peppered with wit and sarcasm. In Red Lights on the Prairies, he quipped that if Western Canadian historians were to be believed, the West had been settled by “monks, eunuchs, and vestal virgins.” In a similar vein in Men Against the Desert, he observed, “More lies have probably been told about the weather of the Dirty Thirties than any other subject except sex; yet most of the lies could have been true.”

Gray’s other great strength was his ability to tell a good anecdote, to put a human face on events and issues. During the 1960s, at the same time that Gray had become a full-time writer, Canadian historians began to place greater emphasis on social history and the experience of everyday people, including those on the margins of society. Gray was already tilling this ground in his writing. Even though his books may not have been based on some new methodology, or were not heavily documented, he did the necessary primary research and then communicated his findings in clear, compelling prose.

In How the West Was Written, Brian Brennan skilfully examines James Gray’s contribution to Western Canadian history against the larger backdrop of his life, family, and career. The reader not only gains an intimate understanding of Gray—his character and personality, warts and all—but also comes to readily appreciate how and why he became one of Western Canada’s most successful social historians. It is an engaging biography, rich in personal detail and insight. Gray would have liked this book. ---Bill Waiser, August 2006

Contents

Foreword
Introduction

Prologue: Canada’s Highest Honour
Early Years—1906–1922
Down and Out in Winnipeg—1930–1931
Reading and Writing—1931–1934
On to Ottawa—1935
Playing Oliver Twist—1937
Sitting out the Second World War—1939–1945
Ottawa Correspondent—1946–1947
A “Prairie Cassandra”—1947–1955
Adventures in the Oil Patch—1955–1964
The Winter Years—1962–1965
A Prairie Historian Emerges—1966
Men Against the Desert—1965–1969
The Boy from Winnipeg—1969
Red Lights on the Prairies—1971
Booze—1972
Cracking the American Market—1973–1979
The Roar of the Twenties—1975
History in the Schools—1975–1977
Selling the Farm—1977
Troublemaker!—1977–1978
Boomtime—1978–1980
Bacchanalia Revisited—1982
Cowboys and Counsels—1982–1986
The Bennett Project—1986–1991
Final Years—1991–1998

A Note on Sources
Acknowledgements

About Brian Brennan
See Brennan Ink:
The official blog of Brian Brennan, best-selling author and award-winning journalist
http://brianbrennan.blogspot.com/