Beautiful and Affordable

Ken

DRUSE
scanography by
Ellen
HOVERHAMP

Who can bring a roomful of gardeners to tears?

KEN DRUSE.

I was sobbing silently as Druse described, with irony and humor, the destruction of his garden created over 30 years.  Hurricane Irene, Lee and the freak snow storm in October washed it all away.

You can't help but admire someone who can segue from disaster to beauty in a few sentences.  Ken Druse was at MetroHort to talk about his new book, Natural Companions.  In an interview on the blog site Garden Rant, Ken said:

I also wanted to make a gardening book that was beautiful and affordable,
something people would want to pick up physically in an electronic age. " 

Druse on Natural Companions:  "it's a "recipe book" or "a book of swatches".  For me, it's kind of  high end pinterest.  The book is organized around Seasons, Families, Textures, Color, Places, Themes, etc.  I understand the appeal.  It's accessible.  It's a way into a challenging subject.  Every chapter has a "photo" by Ellen Hoverkamp.  And these photos have a key that tell you what the flowers or plants are in the photos.  The photos are consciously and meticulously composed.   Natural Companions is an aid to the untrained eye. If you follow the combination you like best, you can achieve a beautiful garden.

Some of prints from the book are available from Ellen Hoverkamp.

 http://www.myneighborsgarden.com

I  go to work in jeans and a t-shirt.  It's serviceable, predictable and timeless, but it wasn't always this way.  Figuring out what outfit to wear...skirt, pants, sweater and most especially the shoes used to occupy a lot of my time.  I am a little jealous of Ken Druse.  He has put together so many permutations of plants; all I want to do is tear out a page from this book and do it!  Druse has figured out a way to make something very complicated fairly simple.  If garden making was only this easy.