Architecture in the Garden

Rating:
Summary: Making good bones
Review: James van Sweden has been designing gardens for over 30 years and he is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. In this book he shares with the reader the essential role that architecture plays in organizing the garden landscape. With carefully chosen examples he shows how man-made features of the garden - paths, walls, gates etc. - create the framework for a garden that is both beautiful and easy to live with.

This book is readable and anecdotal in style, yet it covers the fundamental principles of design and shows how they can be put into practice to enhance many different types of garden. It is extensively illustrated, mostly with the author's own photographs, and these support the text in clearly delineating the applications of design principles to town gardens, seaside gardens, country gardens and so on.

Despite the author's relaxed approach this is a very thorough book and it will be invaluable to anyone planning a garden. My only quibble is that many of the gardens might be called estates, measured in acres, and to some extent this limits the book's practical value to the gardener with a standard city lot, or less.

But good "bone structure" is important in all gardens and this book will help any gardener pull together the significant man-made pieces of the garden into a graceful and beautiful whole.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent primer
Review: This is a great book to get you thinking about the underlying structure of your garden or outdoor space. Van Sweden's style is low-key yet elegant, and his ideas inspirational.

Rating:
Summary: Practical and beautiful
Review: With gardening books more prolific than cyanophyta on a neglected pond, I was expecting typically lovely photos accompanied by a heavy-handed lecture on what HAD to be done and NOT done. This book is so wonderfully not that. The text is distilled expertise, so readable and new its actually hard to look at the pictures. I can't imagine what it would cost to have the author around for an hour to give you this advice in person -but it would be worth it!!Instead, we have this great book with relevant pictures that demonstrate the text perfectly. A cultivated pleasure.