Wondering how to get started with container gardening?

The book, McGee & Stuckey's Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, and Edible Flowers, can help.

Overview

The Bountiful Container focuses on container gardening of vegetables, fruit, herbs, and edible flowers. More importantly for us wildlife watchers, it also covers the basics of container gardening - evaluating one's space, pots, tools, trellises, soil, seeds, and keeping plants healthy.

The book has different sections covering vegetables, herbs, fruit, and edible flowers. Those of us attracting wildlife with plants can skim the vegetable section and focus on the herbs, fruit, and edible flowers.

The book also offers several ideas for a container of mixed plants for specific goals, including a hummingbird garden. It also notes several plants that attract butterflies and other pollinators.

The larvae of swallowtail butterflies are sometimes found on parsley... Soon they will form cocoons, which you can watch for that magical moment when full-grown butterflies emerge.

Pros

1. Well-written and well-reviewed by customers.
2. Provides clear instructions on the basics of container gardening
3. Doesn't gloss over the realities of small-space gardening
4. Offers a small section on evaluating specific small outdoor spaces, covering balcony, deck, patio, porch, rooftops, houseboats, stoops, and entryways
5. Touches on design fundamentals and groupings
6. Covers an example hummingbird container garden
7. Edible fruits, herbs, and flowers are not only draws for humans, but often for wildlife as well
8. Mentions wildlife in connection with certain plants

Cons

1. Focused on human-edible, not wildlife-attracting plants
2. Artwork, but no photos
3. May not present anything new to the experienced container gardener

Conclusion

If you're relatively new to container gardening, this book is well-worth a read, if not a purchase. If you want to focus exclusively on plants that attract wildlife but don't want to garden much yourself, you may want to skip this book and just head to your local nursery for a ready-made wildlife container plant combo.