Design the Perfect Landscape for Your Home - In 12 Simple Steps!

Let Janet Macunovich's practical approach to design help you transform your yard and garden into the landscape of your dreams! New homeowners and first - time landscapers will love this specific, easy-to-understand method. Experienced gardeners will appreciate the professional advice and helpful tips for improving their yards and gardens. Whatever your experience, this book will help you avoid costly and time-consuming mistakes. Most important, it will teach you how to customize a landscape design unique to your needs.

This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn, author of the award-winning The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, argues that the language of landscape exists with its own syntax, grammar, and metaphors, and that we imperil ourselves by failing to learn to read and speak this language. To understand the meanings of landscape, our habitat, is to see the world differently and to enable ourselves to avoid profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes. Offering examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes. She discusses the thought of renowned landscape authors-Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, Lawrence Halprin-and of less well known pioneers, including Australian architect Glenn Murcutt and Danish landscape artist C. Th. Sorensen. She discusses instances of great landscape designers using landscape fluently, masterfully, and sometimes cynically. And, in a probing analysis of the many meanings of landscape, Spirn shows how one person's ideal landscape may be another's nightmare, how Utopian landscapes can be dark. There is danger when we lose the connection between a place and our understanding of it, Spirn warns, and she calls for change in the way we shape our environment, based on the notions of nature as a set of ideas and landscape as the expression of action and ideas in place.

What style to give a garden and how best to lay it out are perennial puzzles for creators of gardens. Gardener/designer Robert Mallet shows how the basic elements of design line, scale, distance, shape, color, and other sensory associations can open the viewer s outlook toward broad perspectives or, conversely, can lock us up in a cage. Reviewing all these elements, Mallet explains what really works, offering a range of practical ideas that can be adapted to visually enlarge space and liberate the mind. He illustrates his ideas in 160 beautiful photographs and the skillful drawings of architect Yves Poinsot. Mallet was for over twenty years in charge of Le Bois des Moutiers, a park created by his grandfather in Normandy, one of the most beautiful gardens in France, where he was able to put his ideas to the test within the context of a masterpiece of scenic design."

With this book I would like to share and give inspiration, experience and knowledge on all aspects of perennial plants in landscape architecture, garden design and horticulture. It gives the reader a solid foundation and keys to successful design, cultivation and propagation of perennial plants and is equally useful to the professional landscape architect, the professional nurseryman and the passionate gardener.