Fill your garden with flowers all-year round with inspiration, planting ideas and expert advice from Sarah Raven.

Colour and scent are the hallmarks of Sarah Raven's style – and they are simple luxuries that everyone can bring into their garden.

A Year Full of Flowers reveals the hundreds of hardworking varieties that make the garden sing each month, together with the practical tasks that ensure everything is planted, staked and pruned at just the right time.

Tracing the year from January to December at her home, Perch Hill, Sarah offers a complete and transporting account of a garden crafted over decades. Sharing the lessons learned from years of plant trials, she explains the methods that have worked for her, and shows you how to achieve a space that's full of life and colour.

Discover long-lasting, divinely scented tulips, roses that keep flowering through winter, the most magnificent dahlias and show-stopping alliums, as well as how to grow sweet peas up a teepee, take cuttings from chrysanthemums and stop mildew in its tracks.

This is passionate, life-enriching gardening; it's also simple, adaptable and can work for you. Sarah has made the garden central to her life – this book shows you how you can too.

Over the years, Japanese gardeners have fine-tuned a distinctive set of pruning techniques that coax out the essential characters of their garden trees, or niwaki. In this highly practical book, Western gardeners are encouraged to draw upon the techniques and sculpt their own garden trees to unique effect. After discussing the principles that underpin the techniques, the author offers in-depth guidelines for shaping pines, azaleas, conifers, broadleaved evergreens, bamboos, and deciduous trees. Complete with abundant photographs, personal anecdotes and a wealth of advice, this unprecedented resource will inspire gardeners everywhere to transform their own trees into niwaki.

Create classic characters in wonderful Tilda style with this gathering of favourite friends. Garden angels keep watch over whimsical cats, a fishing frog, birds and their houses, and many more. Full size, easy to follow templates for stuffed figures and applique allow you to get started straight away. This title features rabbits, birds, frogs, cats and an array of other creatures. Clear artworks and pretty photography make sewing, papercrafting and painting a breeze. Full size sewing templates ensure easy making up.

_______________ 'The Morville Hours is the most beautiful book I have read in years' - Nigel Slater 'A truly remarkable book that is both intimate and universal. We are left with a renewed sense of what it is to be human' - Daily Telegraph 'This is gardening writing at its best. Swift's prose brings the garden alive in all its details, scents and meaning ... Evocative, heartfelt and magical' - Guardian _______________ In 1988 Katherine Swift arrived at the Dower House at Morville to create a garden of her own. This beautifully written, utterly absorbing book is the history of the many people who have lived in the same Shropshire house, tending the same soil, passing down stories over the generations. Spanning thousands of years, The Morville Hours takes the form of a medieval Book of Hours. It is a meditative journey through the seasons, but also a journey of self-exploration. It is a book about finding one's place in the world and putting down roots.

A pond serves as a visual focus for any garden whilst providing a cool oasis where you can get away from it all. This volume gives you clear, concise advice on how to plan, build and maintain a pond even in the most modest garden - and without spending a fortune.

For most people, creating a garden, or caring for and nurturing a garden, is of far greater significance than just gardening itself. Modern-day gardens tend to be more personalised as an expression of individual lifestyle choices. However, with so much information available on the broad subject of gardening and what to plant, it's not surprising that many garden lovers feel intimidated and choose the route of blissful ignorance, while all the time wishing there had been an accessible way of knowing how to do it right the first time. In this publication, the authors have pooled their cumulative knowledge and wisdom of their own practical experience, as well as their respective, proven teaching methods, into a title which will help the beginner and even the more knowledgeable gardener to navigate his or her way through the process of creating a successful garden. The illustrations are visually stunning, and in their own right present a veritable treasury of inspirational ideas. Most importantly, making sense of garden design it is a companion to help you create or recreate your garden. It offers practical exercises and hints, and is a practical, interactive reference and guide to the fundamental topics relating to planning and creating your own garden, including the basic steps in developing a long-term master plan; important considerations such as appropriate choices of styles and plants, water consumption, labour-saving techniques, and security - all shared within a local, South African context, which will also contribute to building confidence and pride in the development and evolution of a uniquely South African gardening style.

Following on from the critically acclaimed The Landscape Lighting Book, this is the lighting design companion every professional and student in landscape architecture needs. Written by an award-winning internationally renowned landscape lighting designer, with over 40 years' experience in professional practice, The Art of Landscape Lighting takes the reader step-by-step through Janet Lennox Moyer's design process. Personal and accessible in tone, the book covers tools, equipment, techniques, effects, installation, design composition and challenges using built case studies spanning the author's career. Each project takes you through the process of how to plan compositions; selecting what should be lit and what should remain unlit; how to prioritize the importance of multiple elements; balancing brightness relationships; providing visual transportation across scenes; lighting the same space in different ways and, importantly, guidance on when designs are complete. Lavishly designed and illustrated with 450 full colour photographs, showcasing projects from start to finish, it additionally includes new landscape lighting equipment and techniques developed by Moyer throughout her career. This includes shore scraping, rainwall lighting, approaches for lighting water features and sculptures, and the 3-prong stake. Aimed at practicing professionals and students in landscape architecture, this book is the must-have inspirational resource that provides you with everything you need to design and implement landscape lighting across multiple scales.

The definitive reference guide to garden design, its rich history, and the creative art of gardening - a luxuriously illustrated A-Z compendium of more than 200 garden elements, styles, features, and ornaments for gardeners around the globe With its easy-to-use A-Z format, The Garden examines over 200 modern and historical garden styles, features, types and ornaments, with definitions and informative descriptions and more than 500 spectacular images. This accessible, inspirational book is perfect for both amateur gardeners and specialists alike. Its entries, written by garden expert and historian Toby Musgrave - author of Phaidon's bestselling book The Gardener's Garden - range from Allee, Borrowed Landscape and Coastal Garden, to Minimalism, New Perennial Planting, Pool, Vista and Xeriscape Garden and form a unique, illustrated 'glossary' for gardeners, featuring more than 400 gardens, both public and private, iconic and lesser known. Examples include spaces such as the Baroque gardens of Versailles and rarely published tropical courtyards from contemporary designers, alongside artist creations such as Frida Kahlo's courtyard in Mexico and Derek Jarman's coastal garden in Dungeness, England. Alongside the work of private garden owners and makers, the book also showcases the work of emerging and eminent designers, including Andrea Cochran, Emily Erlam, Raymond Jungles, Dan Pearson, and Piet Oudolf. Whether creating an English cottage garden or tending a Japanese Zen landscape, the range and beauty of The Garden will inspire gardeners and garden lovers everywhere as never before.

As a reformatted edition, this beautifully illustrated book provides an inspirational and practical introduction to the traditions of Japanese Zen gardens, using natural materials such as wood, bamboo, rocks and pebbles. Emphasizing the value of shape in trees and shrubs with the subtlety of colour through the varied greens of foliage and moss, Serene Gardens is the only book that explains how western plants and materials can be used to achieve the natural, minimalist look so beloved by Japanese garden designers.There are instructions and tips for selecting plants and materials which are readily available, as well as plant lists and climate zone maps to aid western gardeners. As the wealth of stunning colour photographs from around the world demonstrates, Japanese garden design is concerned with a reverence for nature and the overall effect is of tranquility. Serene Gardens will help people to create much-needed oases of calm in their own outdoor spaces.

To create a garden that gives pleasure throughout the year is the goal of every garden-maker. The greatest designers maintain that it is the garden in winter that sets the scene for the remainder of the year. Designing and Creating a Winter Garden takes the reader through the process of designing a new garden from scratch or re-working an existing garden, with winter as the key, formative season. The first part of the book deals with design considerations and ideas, including: assessing the site and its opportunities and constraints; designing the basic framework for winter; making use of low, winter light and using sparkling colour; pots, containers and statuary in the garden, and finally the maintenance of the garden in winter. The second part comprises a detailed catalogue of suggested plants and their uses, grouped into: evergreens; winter-flowering trees, shrubs and perennials, including those that are strongly scented; shrubs with coloured and textured bark and finally, unusual, striking plants to use as focal points. This book sets out to inspire both garden designers and enthusiastic gardeners to create a garden that is as captivating in winter as it is during the remainder of the year.

A bird-friendly garden provides songbirds with food, water and shelter and can increase the number and diversity of your avian visitors. This guide provides step-by-step instructions for creating bird habitats, including planning and maintaining your birdscape, selecting water features, and choosing appropriate native trees, shrubs, and flowers. It includes ideas for collecting and sharing knowledge about the birds your garden attracts, plus a checklist of sources for related videos, apps, and more.

The Gardener's Five-Year Record Book from the RHS is the perfect place to record what happens in your garden over a several years. Structured week by week, with five years to a view, it is flexible enough to personalise to suit your needs. Gardeners know how helpful it is to be aware of what is happening in the garden from year to year - what germinates, flowers or fruits and when; how the weather affects flowering and fruiting seasons and harvests; issues with pests and so much more. This beautifully illustrated journal makes it easy to record and review those changes. There are additional sections on Plants to Buy, Plant Suppliers, Useful Addresses and Gardens to Visit so essential information is all in one place.

Guided by a rediscovered spirit of self-sufficiency, a renewed sense of thrift, and a deepened commitment to the natural environment, legions of people are finding satisfaction in vegetable gardening. As gardeners spend more time in their gardens, they look for ways to make their gardens more productive, their garden chores easier, and their outdoor spaces more enjoyable. Now, with just a little time and a handful of tools, gardeners can create handsome, handcrafted items for their gardens at a fraction of the cost of buying retail. "The Vegetable Gardeners Book of Building Projects" presents 39 ideas for simple projects from cold frames to compost bins, from planters to picnic tables, and from trellises to tool storage. Each project was hand-selected by Storey's editors to be functional, attractive, and easy to complete. Each includes step-by-step instructions, detailed illustrations, complete materials and lumber lists, no-nonsense tips, and a four-color photograph of the finished product in its natural setting. Projects are as practical as they are simple; many are ideal for the beginning woodworker, and most can be completed in a matter of hours. Whether a gardener needs a support for his beans and peas or looks forward to relaxing in a lawn chair or garden swing when the work is done, these plans are the perfect starting point.

A highly original study of eccentric English garden-makers and their extraordinary gardens In English Garden Eccentrics, renowned landscape architect and historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan reveals a series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created at his home at Denbies one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves, and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens in a way that was often thought excessive. With quirky and compelling illustrations and chapters including "Lady Broughton's 'Miniature copy of the Swiss Glaciers,'" "Topiary on a Gargantuan Scale: The Clipped 'Yew-trees' at Four Ancient London Churchyards," and "The Burrowing Duke at Harcourt House," English Garden Eccentrics brings together garden and landscape history with cultural history and biography. The book engagingly reveals what it is about the gardener and his or her creation that can be seen as eccentric and focusses on an area of garden history that has scarcely been explored: gardens seen as expressions of the singular character of their makers, and therefore functioning, in effect, as a form of autobiography. This lively and accessible book calls on gardeners today to learn from example and dare to be eccentric. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

In a compact garden, vertical and overhead spaces take on a different role. Trellises, pergolas, hanging baskets, window boxes, as well as all manner of tubs and containers, create opportunities that are often overlooked in more expansive gardens.

Small Gardens offers ideas for space-saving designs as well as suggestions for suitable plant combinations for patios, terraces, courtyards and other small areas. This book will show you how to transform almost any small space into a garden of delight.

Providing practical projects and advice on how to make the most out of your outdoor space, this book contains over 30 original projects grouped together in themed chapters - seating and eating, wind and weather, birds and wildlife, creative containers, and inspirational ideas. A range of projects are included from simple decorative flowerpots to traditional wooden planters. There is a final section devoted to sources and techniques which includes information on using colour in the garden, paint finishes, and buying and preserving timber.

Designs for gardens and landscapes need to contain accurate information to ensure that both the designer's intent is clear and to enable the highest quality constructions. This book contains the elements most often used when detailing surfaces, with key information on standards, guidance and construction that the practitioner must be aware of. Alongside the text are 2D and 3D images with suggestions of measurements, design considerations and materials. Key topics covered in this book are: Vehicular paving Pedestrian paving and patios Steps and ramps Margins, edges and kerbs Drainage channels To be used in conjunction with the book is an innovative online library of freely downloadable CAD (SketchUp format) details which link directly to those in the book. These details are available for the reader to edit, adapt and use in their own designs - and make the task of detailing for projects that little bit easier.

This is a directory of plants whose greatest attributes in the garden lie in their form and foliage, not merely in their flowers. Ornamental foliage plants for your garden features over 2000 plants from all over the world, many of which are useful cultivars, varieties or forms. They have been selected for their value in the landscaping of gardens, be they big or small. Their claims to fame may be their architectural form, their intriguing texture, their unusual habit, their miniature or immense size, or their suitability for a particular situation, such as for topiary, a conservatory or to provide winter colour. Many plants have been chosen for their striking leaves, which may be patterned, enormous, dissected or magnificently coloured. Every entry has notes on cultivation and use, and is coded to correspond with the climatic zones of the world map at the front of the title. There are at least 1000 colour photographs and 600 line drawings. Gardeners and landscapers have become increasingly aware of how easy foliage plants are to care for and what a magnificent palette they provide for simple, clean garden design. Many lend themselves to small formal gardens for urban spaces, while trees and mass plantings can give perspective and interesting effects in larger gardens. Style is often a matter of restraint and the judicious use of foliage plants sometimes brings to a garden a greater sense of peace and relaxation than one cluttered with colourful flowers.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it seemed to many that England was being transformed by various kinds of 'improvements' in agriculture and industry, in gardening and the ornamentation of landscape. Such changes were understood to reflect matters of the greatest importance in the moral, social and political arrangements of the country. In the area of landscape design, to clear a wood, or plant one, to build a folly or a cottage, to design in the formal style or the picturesque, was to express a political orientation of one kind or another. To choose to employ Capability Brown, Humphry Repton or one of their lesser-known competitors, was to make a statement regarding the history of England, its constitutional organisation and the relationships that ought to exist between its citizens. Although many landowners may have been oblivious to this, there was a large body of critical opinion, poetry, theology and social discourse that offered to inform and correct them. In this illuminating and stimulating book, Nigel Everett reviews the entire debate, from about 1760 to 1820, emphasising in particular the attempts of various writers to defend a 'traditional' or tory view of the landscape against the aggressive, privatising tendency of improvement. Challenging the narrow implications of the existing schools of landscape historians - the 'establishment' historians, concerned primarily with currents of 'taste', who ignore the wider issues involved, and the commentators on the Left who have tended to see landscape politics as the politics of class - Everett reveals the history of English landscape as a political struggle between, on the one hand, the mechanical, universal andimpersonal - whig - point of view and, on the other, the natural, Christian, particular and organic point of view. Everett depicts a lively, intelligent debate regarding the development of English society, as active among cultivated clergymen and landowners as among the theoreticians. Furthermore, analysing the languages of tory political thought, Everett engages in a dialogue between the present and the past, identifying in the detached, artificial and utilitarian attitudes of the whig 'improvers' the philosophical and historical origins of a dominant set of values of the late twentieth century - most recently expressed in the Conservative Party - in which the interests of private enterprise and commercial utility preponderate over any other conception of the public good. This important and passionate book makes an essential and original contribution to the study of eighteenth-century cultural history in Britain.

Create an eye-catching outdoor oasis with this no-nonsense guide to landscaping As families spend more time at home, they're expanding their living space to their yards, decks, and patios. When you're ready to upgrade the look of your landscape, Landscaping For Dummies offers advice on installing fences and walkways, choosing hardy plants and trees, and enhancing natural habitats for the critters and creatures lurking in your neighborhood. You'll find out how to make your backyard a relaxing retreat space and discover the enjoyment and satisfaction that comes from working in your yard. Landscaping For Dummies includes: Lists of recommended plants and varieties, including the best ones for privacy plantings, low-maintenance groundcovers, and small gardens Advice on how to deal with special landscaping concerns, including fire-prone areas, bee and butterfly gardens, and drought-tolerant and native landscapes Instructions on installing permanent features like decks, patios, fences, and more Pointers on how to water more efficiently, including the latest tools and technologies that can save you time With a little bit of planning and some digging, trimming, or planting, you'll be set to enjoy your yard whenever the mood strikes. Let Landscaping For Dummies be your guide to making the most of your outdoor space.