Author offers tips to simplify garden design

April 5, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

If you can’t even match your clothes, can you have a beautiful garden?

With Tom Fischer’s help, yes.

Fischer, garden writer and editor, has written “Perennial Companions: 100 Dazzling Plant Combinations for Every Season.”

The book simplifies garden design by suggesting plants that not only complement one another in color, form and texture, but also bloom at the same time and have like requirements for sun and moisture. The combinations are categorized by season, so you can choose several to give your garden a succession of interest.

“Perennial Companions” is published by Timber Press, where Fischer is editor-in-chief. It sells for $14.95 in paperback.

LEDs in tools light up task

A new line of tools sheds light on hard-to-see places.

UltraTECH’s lighted tweezers and mechanical pickup tool have white LEDs built in to help you see what you’re grabbing.

LEDs are light-emitting diodes, small electronic chips that produce light.

The tweezers come in three styles, all of which are a little more than 6 inches long. The pickup tool is 24 inches long and can grasp items up to 1 inch across.

The tools are available online from General Tools & Instruments’ Web site, www.generaltools.com. Tweezers are $10.95 and the pickup tool, $12.95, not including shipping.

Secrets shared for clean home

You want to learn how to clean properly? Mrs. Meyer can teach you.

Thelma A. Meyer, the namesake of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day products, raised nine kids in a two-bedroom house in Iowa and still managed to keep both her sanity and a reasonable level of orderliness. She shares her secrets — well, for the cleaning part, at least — in “Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Home: No-Nonsense Advice that will Inspire You to Clean like the Dickens.”

The book is a typical cleaning manual, filled with tips on making a sink shine or dusting a lampshade. But it’s also part memoir, with anecdotes from both her and her grown children on life in the ship-shape Meyer household. One of those children is Monica Nassif, who founded the cleaning-products business and named those products after her mother.

“Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Home” is published by Wellness Central and is priced at $19.99 in softcover.

Tailor a home for your lifestyle

Sarah Susanka changed the way we think about home building with her landmark book, “The Not So Big House.”

But not everyone, of course, has the luxury of starting from scratch. So now Susanka and co-author Marc Vassallo are addressing existing homes with “Not So Big Remodeling: Tailoring Your Home for the Way You Really Live.”

The book furthers Susanka’s mission of encouraging people to add character to their homes while getting maximum livability from the square footage. She and Vassallo help readers identify problems, set priorities and develop a strategy for improvement.

“Not So Big Remodeling” is published by the Taunton Press and sells for $32 in hardcover.

Combined dispatches