A cold climate is no excuse for a dull, colorless garden. The key is knowing the right plants that will survive and thrive in even the chilliest environments. Who better to guide gardeners than an expert from the far north? Award-winning designer and Alaska gardener Brenda Adams has spent decades searching for exceptional plants that flourish in wintery climates. In Cool Plants for Cold Climates, she presents vivid and detailed portraits of the best and most beautiful of the bunch.

When Adams moved from the warm Southwest to Alaska, she found herself in a different gardening world, with few guides on how to approach this new ecosystem. Now, more than twenty-five years later, she shares the secrets gained from her years of gardening experiments as well as bountiful advice from friends and local nurseries. She explains how to evaluate a plant, balancing its artistic attributes with its more utilitarian ones, as well as how to evaluate your space and soil. Adams then takes you into the nursery, offering guidance on how to pick the best of the best. Finally, she offers a detailed look at a wide variety of wonderful plants, highlighting those that offer overall beauty, are especially easy to care for, and solidly hardy. With more than three hundred vivid pictures of both individual plants and full gardens, Adams proves that there is a bounty of plants, in a rainbow of colors, waiting to brighten up your space.

Brenda Adams is the designer for and founder of Gardens By Design, Alaska’s premier garden design firm, and author of There’s a Moose in My Garden: Designing Gardens in Alaska and the Far North. She lives in Homer, Alaska.

— Stephanie Cohen, author of The Perennial Gardener's Design Primer and Fallscaping

— Richard Hawke, plant evaluation manager, Chicago Botanic Garden

— Julie Riley, horticulturist, University of Alaska Fairbanks

— Patricia Holloway, professor emeritus, horticulture, University of Alaska Fairbanks

— Sheila Toomey, Alaska Master Gardeners Anchorage

— Choice

— GWA Media Award, Association for Garden Communicators

— Country Gardens

— Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research