Book Review: "The Missouri Gardener's Companion"

There are loads of books out there for gardeners. I raided the library and have some thoughts on a few books.

First up is "The Missouri Gardener's Companion" by Becky Homan, subtitled 'An Insider's Guide to Gardening in the Show-Me State'.
This is a great book for an individual with little gardening experience and a typical suburban or larger area to garden. There are three main sections: foundations (soils, growing seasons, water), plants, and gardening solutions. For someone with a fairly significant amount of space and time, the discussion on soil improvement, irrigated watering, etc provides enough information to create a solid garden. If you simply want to know more about these things, this book is great. But it gets very vague when it comes to specifics for Missouri. The author indicates (and explains) that MO is a transitional area, so there are vast differences between various parts of the state. But the result is that there isn't great information for any part of the state. To work as a good resource, the author needed to spend more time outlining those differences, instead of using a few to explain the transitional geography.
If you're at a complete loss at to what to plant in your garden, this is a good place to start. The author provides lists of "Missouri Favorites" in everything from tropical plants to trees and shrubs. It's a good short list of plants and would be especially useful to someone looking to landscape the entire yard. For more traditional gardening, either of edible or ornamental, the list is too limited and all too often provides the technical name of a plant without enough further information.
The book does include some great resources for more information. There is a comprehensive list of public garden areas (like parks and MO Botanical Garden). The 'Resources' section of the book is very traditional, using a separate 'web sites' category, which would be better incorporated into the other categories. I also noticed a lot of good sources mentioned in the chapters but that are left out of the resources section. Because of that, it makes the book overall less useful as a handy reference.

Pros: lots of general information, good introduction to the MO state transitional climate
Cons: too broad reaching, assumption is that of larger, traditional gardening

Bottom line: good read for basic information if you're new at this but if you're gardening in a small area or have some experience try to borrow a copy to make a list of the resources included

Would I buy this for my library? Nope. But I took notes.