Transatlantic views on garden plants, native plants, invasive plants, books about plants… Plus comment on wildlife, catalog(ue)s, the smartness and the absurdity of plant names, the transatlantic life, fishing, music and more... From Northamptonshire (zone 8) in England and the much icier Pennsylvania (zone 5) in the USA.
Bloom-Again Orchids
If you have problems with orchids you need this book from award-winning orchid expert and photographer judywhite. Click below for more details.
My computer is dead. The handsome Mr Duffy got himself
locked in the home office in the middle of the night - long story – decided
that the only way to get out was to tear around all over the furniture like a
mad thing. And he knocked a large external hard drive and the laptop off the
desk. The laptop fell on the hard drive and its keyboard is bashed in. Now,
instead of that reassuring Mac chime – all it did was make a plaintive little
squeak, and died.
Of course, my back-up using Apple’s superb Time Machine is
right up to date – but the standby machine is too old to run it. I can’t access
my files until the new machine arrives. And some crucial software I use every
day is too new (even though it’s not THAT new) to run on the old machine.
So for the first time in ages I feel cut off from the world
– I’m a writer, I don’t use the phone, I write. And I get used to the email
software pulling email addresses from the address book and never needing to
remember them – but that address book is not now accessible. So if you’re
waiting to receive a response to an email – I’m sorry, as of now I can’t access
it and can’t remember your email address.
It sounds feeble, doesn’t it, the cat killed my laptop. Like
that old schoolboy standby: the dog ate my homework. (Came across this cartoon
showing an alternative solution!) Talking of homework excuses, I remember a kid
in my class at school arriving at school on a sunny summer day drenched from
head to toe and with an empty school bag: he said he couldn’t hand in his
homework cos his bike had hit a rock as he cycled along the river and he’d
fallen in and his homework was swept away. Wouldn’t you rather just do the
homework than deliberately ride your bike into the river?
What is it about black plants? They not only seem to inspire fierce disagreement amongst gardeners – “What’s the point of a plant with black leaves, you can hardly even see it?”/“Simply sumptuous!” – but with another book on the subject just out competition is flaring between the new book and those already published by the acknowledged expert on black plants.
So. Karen Platt has been popularising black plants since her first book came out in 2000 and she now has three different books on the subject. There’s the latest print edition of Karen’s first book, Black Magic and Purple Passion, from 2004. She also has an eBook update to Black Magic and Purple Passion published just a couple of months ago and she has The Best of Black Plants, another eBook published back in the summer. All self-published by Karen Platt. This fall these are joined by a new title from Timber Press, Black Plants by Paul Bonine. (Ordering links at the end.)
Between the latest print edition of Black Magic and Purple Passion and the eBook update Karen covers an amazing 3,500 black plants. Of course, as her title infers, “black” is not always true black, in fact on the jacket of her book Karen refers to them as “dark plants”. There’s also purple and maroon and indigo. Take another look at our slide show, below, for some of the blackest. (Mouse-hover over the images for captions.)
The large format 2004 edition of Black Magic and Purple Passion is excellent. And at only about 50% more expensive than the recent arrival, Black Plants by Paul Bonine, which includes only 3% of the plants, it’s excellent value.
The eBook update is a good addition, with 650 more plants, but is generally less successful. One big problem with eBooks supplied in pdf format is that monitors and printers vary so the same true color is difficult for everyone to achieve. Only one low-resolution print-out is allowed and the low-res image quality of the print-out is nowhere near as good as the printed edition of Black Magic and Purple Passion. And it annoyed me that every time I opened the pdf to look at the book I had to re-enter my password. It should remember.
Then there’s the new Paul Bonine book, Black Plants. This is a small book – 6.5inx7in – and covers just 75 plants. And I have to say that this smaller-then-usual format makes the book seem less significant than I’m sure the publishers would like. Each plant has a full page picture and a description opposite. Generally the images are good (Declaration of interest: four of our images are used in this book); the descriptions and cultural info are not generous and that’s because of the small format. The plant choice is at times odd: two ipomeas, no bearded iris – and why include a very blue Agapanthus when there are many much closer to black? But this is a well-designed, instantly appealing little book.
Black Plants looks good, and (depending where you buy) more or less matches the price of Karen Platt’s Best of Black Plants (pdf only) - and a printed copy will beat a pdf any day. Karen’s eBooks are only available as pdfs, not in other eBook formats. But Karen has more and better info. Paul also fails to recognize Karen Platt’s pioneering work in popularizing black plants – even when discussing a plant named after her.
So, where does that leave us?
If you want an attractive and inexpensive gift book - choose Black Plants by Paul Bonine If you want the best print reference book – choose Black Magic and Purple Passion (Third Edition) If you want the most comprehensive reference to black plants choose the third (print) and fourth (pdf) editions of Black Magic and Purple Passion If you’re a fanatic and want everything, add to these three The Best of Black Plants (pdf only).
Don’t worry, I won’t deluge you with the day-to-day details of my life but I will let you know when new posts go up at my three blogs (RHS New Plants, RHS Trials and Awards and here at Transatlantic Plantsman) remind you of lectures coming up, tell you when I have a piece published in a magazine and occasionally bring you other hot news or ask for help with something I’m working on.
