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Average Customer Rating:

An excellent guide to growing fruit by the RHS

Customer Rating:

I have found this to be an invaluable book which I have used together with the Fruit Expert by Dr Hessayon. The latter is in full colour and is probably a superior guide to choosing your fruit trees and bushes with descriptions, colour pictures and ratings of lots of varieties. The RHS book is aimed at the planting, pruning and care of your fruits once chosen (although it does have short descriptions of the more popular varieties but no pictures of them). This book is in black and white and one other colour but this doesn't really detract from the numerous beatiful drawings. It has comprehensive detail with illustrations on planting and long term care of your fruit trees/ bushes. In particular it has illustrations of pruning for each fruit and each year of growth of that fruit in each of the growing styles available (eg illustrations of how to prune maiden, 2yr, 3yr, 4yr old trees, cordons, fans, pyramids, espaliers for apples with different illustrations for each fruit covered). This scores significantly over the fruit expert book which is much more limited in this regard with very generalised pruning techniques which you have to try and extrapolate to different types of fruit and different years of growth. In summary an excellent book once you have chosen which variety to plant.

The first book to own if you want to grow fruit in yourself.

Customer Rating:

The book is very well presented, with good pictures, photographs and text. Included are all the old favorites plus quite a few unusual or exotic fruits. The RHS get top marks for providing all the information that you will need to successfully grow fruit and presenting it in a very easy to understand way. Whether you are a beginner or a dedicated horticulturalist this book is definately one for the potting shed.