Top picks for garden design books:
The Essential Garden Design Workbook by Rosemary Alexander + Rachel Myers
“The Essential Garden Design Workbook has been the go-to guide for students, professionals, and any gardener passionate about well-designed outdoor spaces. Now, eminent designer-educator Rosemary Alexander has teamed up with rising design star Rachel Myers for a complete update.
New garden plans, new photos and diagrams, and updated profiles of 50 top plants offer timely insights for today’s designers. Advice on designing for sustainability and diversity has been added, along with guidance on planning for garden spaces large and small, using computer-aided design, and starting a garden design business. Detailed sections that lead you through the entire process—pre-design, concept, layout, planning, planting, and maintenance—are more relevant than ever. Invaluable for experienced pros and the next generation alike, this expanded classic is for anyone interested in designing beautiful, successful gardens.”
Gardenista: The Definitive Guide to Stylish Outdoor Spaces by Michelle Slatalla
“The team behind the inspirational design sites Gardenista.com and Remodelista.com presents an all-in-one manual for making your outdoor space as welcoming as your living room. Tour personality-filled gardens around the world and re-create the looks with no-fail planting palettes. Find hundreds of design tips and easy DIYs, editors’ picks of 100 classic (and stylish) objects, a landscaping primer with tips from pros, over 200 resources, and so much more.”
Gardentopia: Design Basics for Creating Beautiful Outdoor Spaces by Jan Johnson
“”Gardentopia is that rare marriage of the art of landscaping and the technical knowledge of how to compose a landscape—boiled down to readily understood and easily executed actions. This book puts you in the driver’s seat and shows you how to chart the course to your own personal garden utopia.” – Margie Grace, Grace Design Associates
Any backyard has the potential to refresh and inspire if you know what to do. Jan Johnsen’s new book, Gardentopia: Design Basics for Creating Beautiful Outdoor Spaces, will delight all garden lovers with over 130 lushly illustrated landscape design and planting suggestions. Ms. Johnsen is an admired designer and popular speaker whose hands-on approach to “co-creating with nature” will have you saying, “I can do that!’”
The Layered Garden: Design Lessons for Year-Round Beauty from Brandywine Cottage by David L. Culp
“The Layered Garden shows you how to recreate Culp’s majestic display. It starts with a basic lesson in layering—how to choose the correct plants by understanding how they grow and change throughout the seasons, how to design a layered garden, and how to maintain it. To illustrate how layering works, Culp takes you on a personal tour through each part of his celebrated garden: the woodland garden, the perennial border, the kitchen garden, the shrubbery, and the walled garden. The book culminates with a chapter dedicated to signature plants for all four seasons.”
How to Design a Garden by John Brookes
“How to Design a Garden is an informative and ultimately practical collection of his thoughts and advice selected from countless writings and lectures given to students, professionals and the public around the world. In addition to his teaching on how to design a garden, the book has two key themes – environmental sustainability and a focus on the local vernacular. They show how far ahead he was of his time and to what a great extent his teaching remains relevant to garden-makers today.”
Elements of Garden Design by Joe Eck
“Elements of Garden Design does what few gardening books do–it addresses the process of conceiving a whole garden, as opposed to a single element like color or a particular class of plant. Joe Eck explores the idea of a garden, and offers a practical approach to translating concepts such as “intention” and “harmony” into the solid forms of hedges and terraces, paths and rooms. Novice and experienced professional alike will find both food for thought and down-on-the-ground advice on such matters as creating child- and pet-friendly designs.”
The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden by Rick Darke + Douglas W. Tallamy
“Elements of Garden Design does what few gardening books do–it addresses the process of conceiving a whole garden, as opposed to a single element like color or a particular class of plant. Joe Eck explores the idea of a garden, and offers a practical approach to translating concepts such as “intention” and “harmony” into the solid forms of hedges and terraces, paths and rooms. Novice and experienced professional alike will find both food for thought and down-on-the-ground advice on such matters as creating child- and pet-friendly designs.”
