The Scandinavian Garden

Rating:
Summary: The best Scandinavian Gardens.
Review: It is spring here in Norway, and the perfect time for gardening. We moved last fall to a 25 years old house with a huge garden, and now we are looking for new inspirations everywhere.

Many of the garden books I find are from a climate much warmer than the one here in the middle of Norway, so reading about grapes, olive treas, huge flowering plants in huge terracotta pots only makes me dream about Italy France and Spain. But then I found the fantastic book about Scandinavian Gardens by Karl-Dietrich Bühler.

Bühler has travelled in the Scandinavian countries and is writing about special and remarcable gardens he has met on his travellings.

The book start with a story of a little boy, actually Bühler's own son, chasing wild gooses, and this reminds Bühler of Niels Holgerson's fantastic travels written by the Swedish Selma Lagerløf. And then Bühler takes us on a travel almost as fantastic as Niels Holgerson's one.

The gardens we meet through the book all has their own charm. Very often when you find a book trying to describe the best gardens, you are taken to the big, public ones, but in this book, together with some of the public garden we also visit some of the quite small, private gardens. We meet the owners and can read about their work of planning and maintaining the gardens.

The book has lots and lots of charming and outstanding pictures. A joy to own, a joy to have on a coffee table, or the garden table. Not as a decoration only, but as a book to look through and get inspiration from when you have washed your hands after hours of garden work.

Britt Arnhild Lindland