This beautifully illustrated personal sketchbook, new to our Courage line of lavish gift books, will be catnip for any gardener. (Previous titles featuring Mary Woodin's vibrant watercolor images have sold more than 300,000 copies.) THE PAINTED GARDEN is a collection of intimate musings, thoughtful philosophies, and touching artwork, with space for recording planting, harvesting, and blooming notes. Readers will discover useful gardening tips, an illustrated list of herbs and their uses, and advice from such well-known British gardening experts as Mary Russell Mitford, C.W. Earle, Vita Sackville-West, and Louise Beebe Wilder.

The Artist’s Garden offers an intriguing study into 20 gardens that have inspired and been home to some of the greatest painters of history. The most alluring image of an artist at work is surely one where he or she has come out of their studio, set up their easel on the garden path, pulled on a hat to shade their eyes from the sun and taken their brush and palette in hand. This sumptuously illustrated and fascinating book delves into the stories behind the gardens which inspired some of the most beautiful and important works of art. These gardens not only supplied the inspiration for creative works but also illuminate the professional motivation and private life of the artists themselves – from Cezanne’s house in the south of France to Childe Hassam at Celia Thaxter’s garden off the coast off Maine. Flowers and gardens have often been the first choice for artists looking for a subject. A garden close to the artist’s studio is not only convenient for daily material and ideas, but also has the advantage of changing through the seasons and over time. Claude Monet’s Giverny was the catalyst for hundreds of great paintings (by Monet and other artists), each one different from the one before. Sometimes a whole village becomes the focus for a colony of artists as at Gerberoy in Picardy and Skagen on the northernmost tip of Denmark. This book is about the real homes and gardens that inspired these great artists – gardens that can still be visited today. The relationship between artist and garden is a complex one. A few artists, including Pierre Bonnard and his neighbour Monet were keen gardeners, as much in love with their plants as their work, while for others like Sorolla in Madrid, his courtyard home was both a sanctuary and a source of ideas. This book is as unmissable for art lovers as it is for anyone who knows the joy of time spent in gardens, offering an intriguing insight into the lives of these great painters and the gardens which inspired them to their creative heights.

Get ready to rock your world! You don't need a green thumb to turn your yard into a work of art! Painted garden art is the perfect, low-cost way to add color and visual interest to your landscape. Lin Wellford makes it easy with these fun, imaginative projects: Vibrant stepping stones Breathtaking focal points and accents Realistic faux fish Ever-blooming borders and flower-filled planters Decorative pieces perfect for any garden, porch, or patio This is art anyone can do!

Set in the heart of the Sussex Downs, Charleston Farmhouse is the most important remaining example of Bloomsbury decorative style, created by the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Quentin Bell, the younger son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, and his daughter Virghinia Nicholson, tell the story of this unique house, linking it with some of the leading cultural figures who were invited there, including Vanessa's sister Virginia Woolf, the writer Lytton Strachey, the economist Maynard Keynes and the art critic Roger Fry. The house and garden are portrayed through Alen MacWeeney's atmostpheric photographs; pictures from Vanessa Bell's family album convey the flavour of the household in its heyday.

Valencian master Sorolla's Impressionist paintings depict the most beautiful gardens and architecture in Spain. Like Claude Monet's celebrated plein air landscapes at Giverny, the series collected in this book represents among the best-loved examples of Joaquín Sorolla's (1863-1923) work, and a window into the Spanish painter's quest to capture the essence of a garden. Described by Monet as "the master of light," Sorolla and his landscapes, formal portraits, and historically themed canvases drew comparisons to contemporary American painter John Singer Sargent. Sorolla had achieved renown on both sides of the Atlantic for grand scenes of Spanish life when he began a personal series of garden works, presented completely for the first time in this publication. Painted at the palaces of La Granja and the Alcázar in Seville, the Alhambra and Generalife in Granada, and at the painter's home in Madrid, these Impressionist works allowed Sorolla to apply his signature loose brushwork and training as a photographer's lighting assistant to gardens and the sculptures, architecture, and sitters that frame and animate them. Sorolla depicted reflections in fountains and pools, the sunlight dappling his glamorous sitters, sprays of orange blossoms, and shaded blue-and-white tile as he endeavored to render the radiant peace of a summer afternoon.