Pretty Tough Plants: 135 Resilient, Water- Smart Choices for a Beautiful Garden

If you are interested in planting species that need very little water, this book is for you. Beautiful photographs and descriptions of every plant variety in the book. Along with their planting zones and soil and sun preferences. Plant Select is an excellent program and I highly recommend this book!

Many gardeners, especially ones in the Denver and Rocky Mountain Region have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Pretty Tough Plants by the experts at Plant Select. The wait is over and the book is more than exceptional. It is a well-written, garden friendly handbook on must have perennials, trees, shrubs, groundcovers, a handful of annuals and smaller “petite” plants for small to any size garden. The basic who/what/where is easy to follow—size, type of flowers, season of flower and best features. I especially like the plant photos, plus the growing culture information and the best places or landscape styles the plants will perform. The plant reference guide (which includes deer resistance and pollinator friendly) in the back of the book is a very helpful recource. It’s the perfect size to read or admire on a coffee table. Thank you Plant Select for these wonderful plants and an outstanding book!

I'm usually a DIY'er, so thought I'd get write-ups on plants either native, or non-native but very appropriate plant for fitting into Colorado native landscaping. That expectation was close! But instead, these are nice write-ups on premium (and expensive) cultivated varieties of those native or appropriate non-native plants. Most of them bigger & showier than their more normal cousins from the wild. Pros: Absolutely stunning premium book, beautiful photos & layout, very good info on the featured varieties. Cons: It's like viewing infomercials on TV - it's informative promotional material on premium brand varieties, not a guide to the generic plant species. So IMO not a good bang-for-the-buck resource for someone doing more generic Colorado landscaping.

My day job is teaching homeowners how to landscape for the arid Intermountain West. Pretty Tough Plants offers up a wide range of plant choices which are less commonly used in this area than they should be. Many of the plants in the book are found in my own yard as well as the conservation-based garden where I work. I would recommend this book for homeowners who are tired of babying plants that don't quite fit our environment. The plants shared are tried and tested in numerous gardens here in the west and help ensure landscape success for homeowners. A copy of this book was donated to the library for our botanical garden but I liked it well enough to purchase my own copy as well.

I am always trying to find plants that I can grow in my altitude of almost 6500 ft. This book was a great help with finding them and also finding the deer resistant ones - which actually tend to be native varieties. It is very helpful with suggesting the waterwise plants, too. I think the book is a great help for novice and expert gardener. I have lots of questions about plants and which ones are the best suited for me. I assume that other folks are like me and are just very interested in this subject. The photos of the plants are beautiful.

As a Master Gardener, I needed this book to help with tried & true plants for the high-altitudes of Colorado. I have several of the listed plants in my gardens and enjoy them immensely. If you live at high-altitude, over 5,000 ft. and enjoy gardening, this book is a must have.

I wanted a xeric bed and needed ideas that are going to work as Colorado has gotten drier and hotter in the 40 plus years I've lived here. I used to get rain......now I rarely do. I'm in a rain shadow outside Denver metro area. I bought some plants from book already this fall.

I am a Plant Select lover. I bought my first variety (sunset hyssop) around 1998 and have searched out and planted these varieties ever since. At first I didn't think the book would be useful to me since I am so familiar with these plants. I have several of the pamplets they publish but with this book, everything is one place. There is new information on most and even how to propagate many of them. The photos are great. If you live where I do in the dryer regions it is a great wish book to help you dream about what and where to plant next. I highly recommend it.

Wonderful unusual yet dependable plants for the hot dry gardens that more of us are coping with these days. Great plants for low irrigation and maintenance gardens. Now, where to find all of them in British Columbia?

Well written but aimed at American reader.

Not a bad book, but definitely not TOUGH plants. Most plants are not hardy below zone 4b. And many not below zone 5. As a zone 3 gardener, there wasn’t much.