The Savage Garden

John Skillcorn

Author: Peter D'Amato
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 0-89815-915-6
Price: £16.99

The Publisher says:
Get ready to enter the strange and beautiful world of carnivorous plants! Beautiful, exotic, and surprisingly easy to grow, many of these savage beauties thrive in gardens, terrariums, and windowsills just about anywhere. Whether  you're a total beginner who's just bought your first Venus fly trap or an expert looking for new, ever  more bizarre plants, this is the book for you.

Packed with indoor and outdoor gardening hints, tips on keeping your carnivores happy, healthy, and hungry, and hundreds of glorious colour photos, The Savage Garden is hands-down the most comprehensive guide to these fascinating oddities of the plant world. It also includes:

Everything you need to get started—from which plants grow best (and) where to setting up a terrarium to what you should know about soil, water, lighting, and propagation.

Species-by-species descriptions of hundreds of plants, from the most popular to the most peculiar.

Detailed growing information on each family of plants.

...and everything else you need to create and nurture your very own little garden of horrors.

PETER D'AMATO ...has been growing flesh-eating plants for over thirty years. His nursery, California Carnivores, houses the world's largest collection of carnivorous plants.

Front cover photo by Sharon Bergeron. 
Author photo by Renee Lynn.  
All other cover photos by Jonathan Chester/Extreme Images, Inc.

My comments:
In spite of the dubious grammar of the descriptive paragraphs above, I rate this book quite highly.  

He has some quaint ways of growing some groups of carnivorous plants.  Who would have thought of growing Utricularia sandersonii inside a little statuette of a country girl leaning on what appears to be a big basket as seen on page 225?  Or indeed of growing Pinguicula moranensis x ehlersiae between the wings of a porcelain swan (page 212)?  Quite clever.

The book contains over 300 pages of text and is written in such a way that you feel you can have faith in what D'Amato is telling you.  Add to this the lavish colour photographs found on almost every page, modest price and you have quite a substantial work on the subject of carnivorous plants that you really cannot afford to be without - if these plants form part of your interest in keeping Dendrobatid frogs.

The book is well bound and printed on quality paper without it being distractingly glossy.