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Books > Health, Home & Family > Gardening > Garden design & planning
'The nation's favourite gardener' - Guardian 'There was nothing
here that could possibly be described as a garden. But beneath
years of neglect was a blank canvas that I could fill with the
garden of my dreams...' Monty Don invites you into Longmeadow, a
place that has become synonymous with Gardener's World, to show how
he creates and tends his own garden, and how you can bring some of
that same magic to our own. Following the cycle of the seasons,
Gardening at Longmeadow is a year-long diary of Monty's gardening
wisdom: from the earliest snowdrops of January and the first
splashes of colour in the Spring Garden, to the electric summer
displays of the Jewel Garden and the autumn harvest in the orchard.
Alongside his rich, personal experiences at Longmeadow, Monty
describes the individual plants coming into their own in the floral
and vegetable gardens and talks you through key tasks, from
composting and lawn maintenance to topiary clipping and fruit
pruning. The result is a very personal account of failure,
bewilderment and surprise, as well as endless pleasure and some
success over the course of a gardening year. With beautiful
photography throughout, Gardening at Longmeadow is an essential
book for gardening enthusiasts of all skill levels. It will inspire
you to achieve a balanced, healthy garden of your own, that's
spilling with produce and full colour all year round.
The Arts and Crafts Movement espoused values of simplicity,
craftsmanship and beauty quite counter to Victorian and Edwardian
industrialism. Though most famous for its architecture, furniture
and ornamental work, between the 1890s and the 1930s the movement
also produced gardens all over Britain whose designs, redolent of a
lost golden era, had worldwide influence. These designs, by
luminaries such as Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Edwin Lutyens, were
engaging and romantic combinations of manor-house garden formalism
and the naive charms of the cottage garden - but from formally
clipped topiary to rugged wild borders, nothing was left to chance.
Sarah Rutherford here explores the winding paths and meticulously
shaped hedges, the gazebos and gateways, the formal terraces and
the billowing border plantings that characterised the Arts and
Crafts garden, and directs readers and gardeners to where they can
visit and be inspired by these beautiful works of art.
"Gardens and Plants of the Getty Villa" is the long-awaited
companion volume to "Plants in the Getty's Central Garden"
published in 2004. In the first part of the book, garden historian
Patrick Bowe explores the design, planting, and uses of the ancient
Roman garden and describes how J. Paul Getty's vision to create
such a garden in California was brought to reality.
The second part includes a sumptuously illustrated guide to the
plants in each of the five gardens at the Villa. Bowe introduces
each of the gardens, describing the underlying concepts and the
relationship to the ancient Roman models as well as their
architectural and sculptural elements present. He also documents
how plantings have been renewed in light of new knowledge emerging
from excavations conducted in the Roman gardens of Pompeii and
Herculaneum. Horticulturist Michael DeHart provides informative
descriptions of the growing habits and characteristics for each of
the plants, citing medicinal, culinary, and ritual uses for many of
them.
"Sustainable Landscaping For Dummies" provides hands-on, how-to
instruction for realizing the benefits of a sustainable landscape
from selecting sustainable hardscape materials to installing a
rainwater catchment system to choosing native plants.
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