Your House, Your Garden: A Foolproof Approach to Garden Design by Gordon Hayward, Janet Fredericks (Illustrator), Richard Felber (Photographer)

From the Publisher

Finally, homeowners can tackle new garden designs and fix old ones with the confidence and know-how to succeed. Professional garden designer Gordon Hayward provides the tools by demonstrating the guiding principles behind his own designs: take clues from the style, materials, and proportions of existing features, particularly your house, but also garages and outbuildings, property lines, streets, walls, and walkways. Look closely at these features, and they will suggest good design.



Over sixty color photographs and over one hundred detailed watercolor sketches of Hayward's plans for his clients show how to read the clues and then design gardens that relate to their surroundings and unify entire properties. Many tricks of the trade are given, including how to make inviting, sheltering entry gardens; screen unsightly features and utilities; and reclaim narrow, shady side yards. Surefire methods for designing front, side, and backyard gardens are explained.

Publishers Weekly

A gifted teacher, Haywood (Stone in the Garden) begins with a deceptively simple idea: "Your house is the center of your garden." His exploration of what that means both as "an aesthetic notion" and a "practical tool" gives the reader a solid foundation in home garden design. In six chapters devoted to the main locations for the garden-front, side, back (including patios and terraces), ells or courtyards, between buildings and around outbuildings-readers learn how to create inviting outdoor spaces, solve common problems and establish a unifying flow. Hayward's examples from his work as a prominent garden designer illuminate principles that home gardeners can apply to their own circumstances. He prescriptively presents welcome solutions to eyesores such as "power lines and meter boxes, propane tanks, satellite dishes, mounded leach fields" and more. While the book includes many helpful planting suggestions and plant lists (as well as 200 helpful photos and drawings), this is not a what-to-plant-where guide. Hayward's approach is fundamentally architectural, and he warns not to "expect all the answers to rely solely on plants." For Hayward, a garden is "made up of paths and sitting areas among trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals in pots, furniture, and garden ornaments." Numerous detailed watercolors and color photographs show the interplay of plants with structural elements such as paths, steps, arbors, fences and stone walls. The reader who follows Hayward's advice to "bring your creative mind to our images" will be rewarded with "no end of springboards for your own garden designs." (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Many landscape design authors discuss ways to integrate a garden with the house and other existing property features. Hayward (Stone in the Garden), however, goes beyond general principles like color and size, structuring this book around the concept that "your house is the center of your garden [not just as an] aesthetic notion but [as] a practical tool." Chapters focus on the various zones around a house: the front garden (there is advice on how to design a welcoming sense of "entrance" to the home through hardscape and plantings that reflect the style and materials of the house itself); side yards, back gardens, and terraces; gardens in an ell or courtyard; and areas between buildings and around outbuildings. Each includes sidebars and short articles on solving practical problems, such as concealing meter boxes, designing foundation plantings to survive snowfall off the roof, beautifying the space beneath a raised deck, and hiding a mounded leachfield. This combination of design principles and practical solutions to problems faced by all homeowners-not just avid gardeners-makes this a uniquely useful addition to all collections on gardening and landscape design, especially in public libraries.-Beth Clewis Crim, Prince William P.L., VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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