The Natural Plaster Book: Earth, Lime, and Gypsum Plasters for Natural Homes Paperback – July 1, 2002

I really enjoyed reading this book! It has lots of good information in it, and I also liked the formatting. If you are interested in natural building finishes, this is a great read. I was specifically interested in tagilakt, and it mentions it, but doesn't give detailed instructions. But it is definitely a good info source for most natural plaster types.

I just finished building my strawbale home -- and am very grateful for this book. I have nothing but great things to say about it. This book picks up where others leave off. An absolute must if you plan on using natural materials on your home. One must understand that working with natural materials is hardly a science-- and a fair amount of experementing must be done to get satisfactory results. But the effort will be worth it! Get this book-- you won't be sorry. FYI-- I used an earthen plaster (clay,manure,sand) on the interior and exterior, and finished the interior with an alis and the exterior with a lime plaster and lime wash-- beautiful results!

I had been waiting for this book from the publisher for over half a year. While it has many helpful details on the nature of additives and why they would be used, and the application of plasters to different substrates, with emphasis on covering straw bale homes, there are no recipes. This really disappointed me, as I believe I could have figured out how to hold a hawk and trowel, and really, anyone building all or part of their house will likely have passed the point of getting useful information out of the first 84 pages by the time they get to need some eductation on plasters. Hopefully, a saving grace will be the resource guide in the back, but access to that could have been obtained by borrowing it from the library.

Plaster and adobe, well, they belong together. They are a holon, a system, they are like love and marriage... not many adobe people get the value of plaster, lime especially. It's a labor thing, for sure, it's pre-industrial, it's historic, going back to Rome and back and back..... you get the picture. This is the definitive book on plaster. It is written by experts who appreciate the craft and its value to earth builders. It's absolutely necessary if you want to build with adobe and not have problems down the road, from going lazy, or going "modern" and making all kinds of mistakes.Of course, straw bale people need to read this. Cement is evil! Evil! Plaster is good. Good!

The Natural Plaster Book is an excellent book for people who are interested in environmentally friendly way to create and update a home. I found it very informative and gave me just the information I needed to create my own plaster. Excellent read.

Not worth the money as a technical reference or how-to book. Otherwise a pleasant read with some inpired pics and a very general overview of the process. Speaks, for the most part, to strawbale contruction as if strawbales are some naturally occurring thing harvested from the wild when are in fact a product of energy intensive industrial agriculture. Fails to provide important technical details such as estimating for coverage, application on masonry, frame and other 'natural' structures, guidelines for plaster preparation. If you already have building experience and skills there are far better reference books available to actually base work upon.

This book was recommended by a relative when we were replastering the interior of an old home. It is a very useful book, for any kind of plaster architecture.

Cedar Rose includes lots of information, technique tips and recipes for a variety of different types of plasters. The pictures are helpful as well.

This is still the best out there on the magic and practicality of earthplasters in modern natural building.Combine this with books on straw-bale, hempcrete, earthbag, adobe, or rammed-earth construction for design ideas and finishes.

Good service, book condition alittle less in quality than I had hoped.

Having worked as cob and lime builder for number of years I can say this book offers some good examples. However it does focus more upon earth building as opposed to lime, stone etc as is needed in UK. Well worth a read though

An absolutely excellent book on this fascinating subject. Well researched and practical. Can't wait to get out there and do some more plastering!