I'm going to start with Tracy DiSabato-Aust's books. Pcalenda mentioned her a couple of times, for good reason. She has written The Well-Designed Mixed Garden and The Well-Tended Perennial Garden: Planting and Pruning Techniques. The books are beautifully illustrated and she gives you lots and lots of examples of borders – mixed plantings of trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, vines, and bulbs. The book will help you think about color, style, space, textures, and plant combinations. She has diagrams of plantings drawn to scale with the numbers and names of plants, and the book concludes with a long section listing plants with their zone, light, moisture, and pH requirements. She'll have you drooling for planting season and scouring the catalogs. You can also think about diagramming what you have in your garden right now and maybe that way you can think about what you could move, what you like, and what you want to add.
Another book I use all the time is George Schenk's The Complete Shade Gardener. It hasn't got as many color photos (which makes it less expensive). In the first chapter he narrates his own experience planting a tiny 'terrace' that had been mostly filled with concrete by the builder. He lets you know how he made his choices, and how he modified them. Then he goes on to talk about kinds of shade and the soils that go with them (and what to do about those soils). The rest of the first part looks at planting, maintenance, lawns, pests, and degrees of shade. Most of the book is devoted to the plants themselves, organized by type – trees, shrubs, groundcovers, and so on. There aren't as many photographs, so you'll need another book or the internet to get images of the plants, but it's great to have a list of what grows well in what kinds of shade.
The rest of the books I’m going to write about today have more to do with the overall structure of the garden and less to do with plants. When I first started studying design it took me awhile to get over my fixation on plants and see the larger whole, but it gets addictive. Thinking about the space architecturally, functionally, and aesthetically helps you to balance plants, and the many services they provide, with a space that welcomes you to spend time with the plants.
For example, I had a deck built onto my house a decade before I began doing any design work. I wish I had known then.... Now I wish I had a terrace down at plant level, so that I could sit, grill, eat, and just relax among the plants, instead of looking down on them from 7 feet up. A ground-level terrace would allow me to enjoy the plants at a more micro level, and it would screen my view of the ugliest garage in Chicago, located conveniently right across the alley outside my fence. But alas. Once I hit the jackpot, then I'll tear down the deck and do what I wish I'd done in the first place.
One of my very favorites is the English designer, John Brookes. He has lots of books, so I'll just talk about one and you can have the fun of discovering the rest. The Well-Designed Garden starts also with an autobiographical chapter, but here it's on the influences on his design style. It serves as a primer on garden history, and I think you'll find it fascinating. Brookes then goes on to include chapters on setting, shape, direction, levels, enclosure, entrance, surface, structure, planting, water, and style. In the chapter on shape, for example, he looks at the shapes of plants as inspirations for garden shapes. He talks about formal garden shapes, gardens with geometry, modernist gardens, inspirations from landforms, variations on shape in small gardens, organic garden shapes, and he concludes this chapter with several pages of designs showing the ideas in action, with both plan drawings and photographs. The photographs of gardens of many styles from all over the world will get your imagination going. Brookes's is a book you'll actually want to read, and not just use as a reference.
Another English garden designer whose work I like a lot is Robin Williams. No joke. One of the easiest to get is the Reader's Digest Garden Design: How to be Your Own Landscape Architect. First Williams takes you through the design process, including surveying and analyzing your property, working out your functional needs and the areas appropriate for each, traffic patterns through the space, and then developing concept plans and finished designs. These are well done and important if you're going to think about your garden holistically. What I like best about this book are the drawings he supplies for all the elements he goes on to enumerate. He devotes sections of the book to horizontal surfaces, and includes information on various kinds and patterns and uses of decking, paving, soft surfaces, steps, etc. For example, in the section on paths, he diagrams how a path is constructed and draws different paving patterns for brick, constructed materials, stone, etc. In the section on Vertical elements, he considers planted screens, fences, structures like pergolas and arbors, walls, even grottos. He includes drawings or diagrams of all these elements, so you can get a lot of ideas from his book. In a chapter on furnishing the garden, he includes containers, pots, vases, and gardening for special needs, as well as lighting, water and rock features, barbeques and seating, children's play areas, tennis courts, swimming pools..... Ah we can dream, right? He closes the book with plans for a number of gardens. The drawings are detailed and clear; I wish I could draw half as well.
Gordon Hayward lives in Vermont; his book Your House, Your Garden is subtitled "A Foolproof Approach to Garden Design." Like Williams' book, Hayward's is rich in drawings as well as photographs, suggesting ways you can think visually about your own garden. Like all good designers, he situates the garden in context of the architecture and the site, and his book is organized into areas: the entrance garden, side gardens, back gardens, patios, and terraces, gardens in an ell or courtyard, gardens between buildings, and outbuildings and gardens. Photographs give a finished impression, while plan drawings show the various elements in proportion and relation. Hayward is often problem-driven, which is very useful, so he includes information on things like how much space do you need for a driveway turnaround or dealing with driplines. His work seems geared to suburban gardens rather than country estates or city courtyards, but the principles apply. He includes gardens from many zones (most of these books do), so if you're in Arizona or Minnesota, you'll find sections directed at your issues.
OK, that's it for this time. If you can, get to a bookstore where you can page through some of these. If you haven't thought about design as part of gardening, they'll give you a new world of imagination.
Let me know what else you'd like me to write about and I will if I can. And do visit my website at view link
