Wildlife Botanical Garden

June 07, 2025

Waterwise Gardening - a book review

Waterwise Gardening: Everything You Need To Know About Efficient Watering to Grow a Healthy Yard by Richard Restuccia Published by Rizzoli, 2025 I would guess that watering is the major issue that most gardeners grapple with, especially novice gardeners. I know from working at the nursery that the majority of questions and issues we get stem from either watering too much or not watering enough. Many people in our area have sprinkler systems and I'm sure that can be a good thing if used properly but I feel that they primarily keep the lawns green but fall short for landscape plants. Especially when it comes to trees and larger plants, the timing and amounts are not satisfactory for many plants. I often hear people say that their sprinklers are set to come on every day - yikes! And there are those who did not water because it "rained" when it actually drizzled. The best thing to do in this situation is to have a xeric garden but that would mean sacrificing favorite plant...

I made another visit to the Wildlife Botanical Garden in Brush Prairie, about 15 minutes from our house. We had visited earlier in 2018. Since that time, it was not surprising to see that things had really grown. I was looking over the photos from my earlier post and I didn't even see certain plants this time (for example, the Mimosa tree).

Fall flowers, like rudbeckia and asters dominated -