Explore 100 gardens from around the world with this illustrated guide to the design elements of each—from historical style to planting and landscape design. This comprehensive reference offers gardens from many periods of history—Islamic, Renaissance, English Landscape, Arts & Crafts, and more—and geographically diverse environments—from a nighttime sculpture garden on the Oregon coast, to a sustainable water garden in the mountains of Vermont, and the Mughal garden at the Indian president’s palace in New Delhi. They are inspirational works made by both talented amateurs and major international garden designers—including Britain’s Christopher Bradley Hole, Italy’s Luciano Giubbilei and Paolo Pejrone, and Americans Isabelle Green, Raymond Jungles, and Martha Schwartz. In this affordable volume boasting 500 illustrations, readers are led through the details of each garden and provided with the tools needed to understand and replicate each exemplary design—whether the site is rural or urban, a backyard or a beach, in any climate, and on any budget. Each beautiful project photo is followed by a list of key concepts, numbered close-ups that highlight aspects of the design, and expert write-ups to explain how each element serves the garden as a whole. Whether looking for a whole landscaping scheme, or simply an individual idea for a water feature or a wall, readers will find a wealth of ideas to choose from. Both experienced and armchair gardeners will find that Gardens in Detail will enhance their appreciation of how good design decisions are made at every scale.

In a time of climate change and mass extinction, how we garden matters more than ever: “An outstanding and deeply passionate book.” —Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals Plenty of books tell home gardeners and professional landscape designers how to garden sustainably, what plants to use, and what resources to explore. Yet few examine why our urban wildlife gardens matter so much—not just for ourselves, but for the larger human and animal communities. Our landscapes push aside wildlife and in turn diminish our genetically programmed love for wildness. How can we get ourselves back into balance through gardens, to speak life's language and learn from other species? Benjamin Vogt addresses why we need a new garden ethic, and why we urgently need wildness in our daily lives—lives sequestered in buildings surrounded by monocultures of lawn and concrete that significantly harm our physical and mental health. He examines the psychological issues around climate change and mass extinction as a way to understand how we are short-circuiting our response to global crises, especially by not growing native plants in our gardens. Simply put, environmentalism is not political; it's social justice for all species marginalized today and for those facing extinction tomorrow. By thinking deeply and honestly about our built landscapes, we can create a compassionate activism that connects us more profoundly to nature and to one another.

This beautifully illustrated book offers a practical guide to recreating traditional Japanese-style gardens. Authentic Japanese Gardens is the only book that explains how non-Japanese plants and materials can be used to achieve the natural, minimalist look of Japanese garden designs. This revised, photo-heavy edition features new text and stunning new color photography. Now available in paperback and re-sized to 8.5” x 11”, this book was formerly published as Serene Gardens (ISBN: 978-1-78009-517-2).

What do we expect of gardens - when we make them and when we visit them? Could we get more from them, if we thought harder about what it is we want and why we make gardens? This book approaches the experience of being in a garden from many different angles, questioning many of our easily-adopted assumptions and suggesting ways of getting more from any garden, whether it is our own or one we are visiting.

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Great Gardens in Small Spaces features 44 wonderful and exquisitely photographed California gardens, specifically treating the small garden, its particular challenges and its abundant opportunities and rewards. 300 color illustrations.

This is an entirely different garden book: a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. There is a universality about the creation of gardens across time and in diverse cultures that has inspired this entirely different garden book: a playful and affectionate typology of gardens; a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. The Poetics of Gardens is a celebration of places and the gardens they can become. Most of the 500 sketches, axonometric drawings, and photographs were created especially for this book. They explore the special qualities of places and the acts that can transform them into gardens. The authors discuss the qualities that create the promise of a garden the shapes of land and water, the established plants, the light and wind, the climate and show how these can be organized to give a place a special meaning. And they pay particular attention to the "rituals of habitation" by which we imaginatively take possession of places on the surface of the earth. The Poetics of Gardens examines great gardens made in other places, with other climates, at other times from ancient Rome to modem England, from Ball to Botany Bay, from the court of Ch'ien Lung to the magic kingdom of Walt Disney to explore their devices and record their images, scents, and sounds. The authors discuss the adaptation of the great garden traditions of the past to North American soil and call together the creators of these gardens to speculate about how their patterns and ideas can be appropriated, transformed, and composed into places that come alive for us.