Book Review: Carnivorous Plants: Gardening with Extraordinary Botanicals

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I finally got my hands on the newly published Carnivorous Plants: Gardening with Extraordinary Botanicals by Nigel Hewitt-Cooper. If you're into British Gardening books, this is a great book. It is really well designed as an ideas guide for the average English garden. To that end, there is quite a bit of discussion on Sarracenia, Venus Flytraps, and Drosera that would do well outside, and suggestions for types of these genera to put in decorative containers. (It's actually inspired me to look for more decorative containers for my bog gardens).

This is not the traditional carnivorous plant book in the vein of my Cultivating Carnivorous Plants. It is not designed to be. It's concerned with growing and cultivation information for the commonly available types of carnivores which you may find sold along succulents and air plants at your local nursery. It's really an ideas book as to what to do with those plants, more than an accounting of the various genera and information about them.

To that end, this book is organized with a gardener's perspective in mind, rather than a carnivorous plant collector's perspective in mind. So, the discussion of Cephalotus and Nepenthes is short and relegated to the "Taking Things To The Next Level" (Advanced Gardening) chapter rather than being a central focus as with many other carnivorous plant books. 

I expect to add this book to my library next to a book on alpine gardening and water gardening rather than next to my books focused exclusively on carnivorous plants. That's where it really fits in.