Refresh Your Garden Design with Color, Texture and Form


Book Description

Breathe new life into your garden! Maybe your garden isn't what it once was. Or maybe it's stunning during the full bloom of summer, but falls apart the rest of the year. Maybe it's crowded, sparse, boring, disjointed...or it just doesn't resonate with you, and you have no idea why or what to do about it. Don't retreat indoors! In this friendly guide, acclaimed landscape designer and best-selling author Rebecca Sweet offers simple strategies for transforming established plots and empty spaces into the garden of your dreams--a place that soothes your soul and revives your spirits year-round. Start by identifying problems with your current plantings (such as clashing colors, lack of flow and "one-of-each-itis"), then learn how to inject new life using artful combinations of color, texture and form. At the back of the book, you'll find a thoughtfully curated selection of 78 plants perfect for creating key elements of harmony in your garden. You don't need to be a professional landscaper to put these concepts into play. With this book as your guide, turning blah spaces into breathtaking places becomes fun, easy and perennially rewarding! Overflowing with creative examples of how to... Wake up boring beds. Make a cramped garden feel bigger, or bring a sense of intimacy to an expansive area. Downplay eyesores. Create moods ranging from serene to stimulating. Add four-seasons interest. Decide which plants to keep, and which to pull. Thoughtfully integrate hardscaping, structures and accessories. Transform an ordinary garden into one that's memorable and meaningful!




Decorating with Plants


Book Description

The complete guide to “greening” your space, with ideas and inspiration for adding plants to every room in your home, plus a directory of versatile, easy-to-care-for specimens.




Lawn Gone!


Book Description

A colorful guide covering the basics of replacing a traditional lawn with a wide variety of easy-care, no-mow, drought-tolerant, money-saving options that will appeal to today's busy, eco-conscious homeowner. Americans pour 300 million gallons of gas and 1 billion hours every year into mowing their lawns, not to mention 70 million pounds of pesticides and $40 billion for lawn upkeep. No Wonder the anti-lawn movement is thriving, as today's eco-conscious consumers realize that their traditional lawns are water-hogging, chemical-ridden, maintenance-intensive burdens. Lawn Gone!, from award-winning gardening blogger Pam Penick, is the first basic introduction to low-water, easy-care lawn alternatives for beginning gardeners, written in a friendly style with an approachable package. It covers all the available time-saving options: alternative grasses, ground cover plants, artificial turf, hardscaping, mulch, and more. In addition, it includes step-by-step lawn-removal methods, strategies for dealing with neighbors and homeowner associations, and how to minimize your lawn if you're not ready to go all the way.




Design-Your-Garden Toolkit


Book Description

Before picking up the trowel, pick up the stickers! With 150 reusable illustrated stickers — representing dozens of plant cultivars that are versatile, readily available, and suitable for most temperate growing zones — plus a fold-out design board and a book teaching five easy steps of garden design, you’ll have everything you need to create your vision of the perfect garden. The durable cling stickers, with beautiful botanically accurate illustrations, can be layered, arranged, and rearranged to try out every variation before making any plant purchases. This book-and-kit combination makes it possible to create your dream border, bed, or backyard oasis without leaving your kitchen table!




Designing with Conifers


Book Description

With blue, green, and gold foliage and shapes ranging from spiky to weeping, conifers have the potential to be garden design stars. But they are commonly misused in gardens and landscapes, leading to looming spruces squashed against a house or rows of kettledrum-shaped yews along a sidewalk. When used correctly and creatively, conifers can be star players in creating beautiful, long-lasting plant combinations or serene backyard havens. Designing with Conifers shows readers exactly how to choose the best conifers for specific needs. Chapters cover shape, color, and conifers for specific sites and conditions, including front gardens, hedges and screens, topiary, dwarf conifers, shade gardens, Asian-style gardens, bonsai, and miniature railroad gardens. Also includes useful appendices that list of conifers for various problems and conditions, like conifers for areas plagued by deer and the best conifers for Christmas trees and Southern gardens. Each section is enlivened with gorgeous color photographs. Whatever landscape situation or challenge a gardener designer faces, Designing with Conifers shows how to make the best choice from this beautiful, useful, and versatile group of plants.




Perennial Garden Design


Book Description

This useful book instructs gardeners in all aspects of designing with perennials, from color schemes to matching different styles of gardens. Full color.




Garden Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces


Book Description

Vertical gardening is the latest, most talked about trend in gardening. Outdoor living walls planted with anything from succulents to vegetables, are springing up in urban and suburban areas and even commercial spaces. Home gardeners are now ready to take advantage of the vertical spaces in their own gardens. Ornamental gardeners searching for help with narrow planting beds or choosing the appropriate trellis, small space gardeners in need of specific solutions, edible gardeners interested in creative ways to mix edibles with ornamentals will find the help they need. Garden Up! offers inspiration and how-to information for enhancing any outdoor space. Authors Susan Lee Morrison, and Rebecca Sweet offer advice on plant selection across the country, and include easy do-it-yourself projects than add unique touches to any garden. This innovative book was named to the Top 10 Home & Garden list for Amazon's Best Books of 2011!




Perennial Combinations


Book Description

Offers planting plans and plant descriptions to maximize the effects of color in a perennial garden




Gardening with Shape, Line and Texture


Book Description

Gardening with Shape, Line and Texture bridges the gap between garden design books and plant reference encyclopedias. Leading landscaper Linden Hawthorne looks at plants from a designer's perspective (where color is often a secondary consideration) and emphasizes the important roles of plant shape. Part One reviews fine art principles and shows how they can be successfully applied to plant compositions by grouping plants into three heights: ground to knee, knee to navel, and navel to crown. She identifies different plant shapes—buns, mounds, tiers, fountains, uprights—and shows how the use of them contributes to the success of the finished design. Part Two is a plant sourcebook with plants listed alphabetically within their key plant shape categories. This innovative plant reference delivers plant information in a form that neatly dovetails with the garden design process and will inspire gardeners to look beyond color and begin to appreciate the whole plant.




Designing with Plants


Book Description

Piet Oudolf's gardens excite the senses and stir the emotions. Representing a giant step forward from the conventional colour-themed border, this new approach to gardening gives just as much emphasis to form, texture, light and movement as it does to colour. Individual plants are used as harmonious elements in luxuriant and atmospheric plantings. Written in collaboration with Noël Kingsbury, Designing with Plants is an informative and visually breathtaking study of Piet Oudolf's planting theory and practice, and it provides all the advice necessary to create the same effects in your own garden.Beginning with the building blocks of planting design, a visual sourcebook of Planting Palettes illustrates some of the huge choice available in terms of form, texture and colour. The following chapter explains, with the use of planting plans and diagrams, how to combine these basic elements to create stunning and sculptural planting schemes. Theory is put into practice in Planting Moods in which stunning photography demonstrates how to create a particular feeling or atmosphere, and Year-Round Planting emphasizes the importance of choosing plants to give value throughout the seasons so that they contribute to the garden in death as well as in life. Rounding off with a detailed directory of key plants, Designing with Plants is destined to become an inspiration to all gardeners who wish to create, in Piet's words, 'an impression and an expression of nature'.