Coffee table book about wild gardens
October 8, 2024 5:12 AM Subscribe
As a present for my wife I am looking for a nice coffee table book about stunning gardens. She likes her garden a bit more on the wild side, so not the "english garden" style. Any ideas? Would be nice if there are not only pictures but also a somewhat substantial text about the gardens, or interviews with the creators.
I think Kelly Norris's New Naturalism is a really spectacular work. Piet Oudolf is sort of the 'inventor' of contemporary/western naturalist gardening. Anything by or about him would suit her.
posted by Think_Long at 6:05 AM on October 8, 2024 [4 favorites]
posted by Think_Long at 6:05 AM on October 8, 2024 [4 favorites]
Anything you can find by Edna Walling, or featuring her garden designs, should fit the bill. More on her style.
posted by flabdablet at 6:14 AM on October 8, 2024
posted by flabdablet at 6:14 AM on October 8, 2024
Wild, by Noel Kingsbury, and Piet Oudolf at Work (both published by Phaidon) are great, as are Kelly Norris' New Naturalism and Ian Hodgson's New Wild Garden.
posted by box at 7:11 AM on October 8, 2024 [2 favorites]
posted by box at 7:11 AM on October 8, 2024 [2 favorites]
I would recommend Eden or The Lost Gardens of Heligan, both by Tim Smit, as they are fascinating stories of pioneering gardens. Eden was never intended to be a normal garden, and Heligan was once a quintessential English garden, lost for decades and rediscovered under hugely overgrown planting, not quite restored but remade with an emphasis on remembering its "lost" roots. Both are great coffee table books!
posted by london explorer girl at 5:33 AM on October 10, 2024
posted by london explorer girl at 5:33 AM on October 10, 2024
Oudolf & Kingsbury 2019 Planting a New Perspective [Timber Press link].
Hitchmough & Dunnet 2004 The Dynamic Landscape: Design, Ecology and Management of Naturalistic Urban Planting [Routledge link].
Both books above are manuals for more naturalistic approaches to planting from reasonably small scale up to huge. I've just completed year one (of six) of a 5 hectare very naturallstic landscape (which creates habitat, provides amenity via paths and glades, and retains a large are of soil creep) that extends on some of the ideas in these books - and could probably write a new chapter (I'll be blogging about it soon).
The trick with large scale landscape design and management is producing a way for planters to plant without overly burdening them with precise planting positions and plans, they will only plant for you once if you do this. The books above are useful as they stimulate the mind to finding ways to do this (although some ideas are insane).
Filippi’s Planting Design for Dry Gardens [Filbert Press link] is helpful, and here’s a look at Filippi's style from Noel Kingsbury on his blog. A client asked me to use the approach for a dryland garden, and it introduced me to some new cultivation approaches. Filippi for me is only about dryland horticulture, as I'm a bit more random stylistically.
Don’t be put off by the fact that this is 2004; landscape books go out of meaningfulness extremely slowly, and innovations into landscape are likewise glacially slow - I think landscape is the last of all of human culture to pick up a new idea, closely followed by theology.
2nding Tim Smit’s Eden, and The Lost Gardens of Heligan. We spent two spent two whole days and Heligan, and got locked into the Tropics Dome at Eden (we were the last out – I could spend weeks there). Eden gets into the nuts and bolts of open-tendered contracts, large landscape planning, funding, garden history… (it was their invention). Heligan has a strong focus on garden history and trying to unearth what happened centuries prior when the records have been destroyed.
posted by unearthed at 11:53 PM on October 10, 2024 [1 favorite]
Hitchmough & Dunnet 2004 The Dynamic Landscape: Design, Ecology and Management of Naturalistic Urban Planting [Routledge link].
Both books above are manuals for more naturalistic approaches to planting from reasonably small scale up to huge. I've just completed year one (of six) of a 5 hectare very naturallstic landscape (which creates habitat, provides amenity via paths and glades, and retains a large are of soil creep) that extends on some of the ideas in these books - and could probably write a new chapter (I'll be blogging about it soon).
The trick with large scale landscape design and management is producing a way for planters to plant without overly burdening them with precise planting positions and plans, they will only plant for you once if you do this. The books above are useful as they stimulate the mind to finding ways to do this (although some ideas are insane).
Filippi’s Planting Design for Dry Gardens [Filbert Press link] is helpful, and here’s a look at Filippi's style from Noel Kingsbury on his blog. A client asked me to use the approach for a dryland garden, and it introduced me to some new cultivation approaches. Filippi for me is only about dryland horticulture, as I'm a bit more random stylistically.
Don’t be put off by the fact that this is 2004; landscape books go out of meaningfulness extremely slowly, and innovations into landscape are likewise glacially slow - I think landscape is the last of all of human culture to pick up a new idea, closely followed by theology.
2nding Tim Smit’s Eden, and The Lost Gardens of Heligan. We spent two spent two whole days and Heligan, and got locked into the Tropics Dome at Eden (we were the last out – I could spend weeks there). Eden gets into the nuts and bolts of open-tendered contracts, large landscape planning, funding, garden history… (it was their invention). Heligan has a strong focus on garden history and trying to unearth what happened centuries prior when the records have been destroyed.
posted by unearthed at 11:53 PM on October 10, 2024 [1 favorite]
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posted by seemoorglass at 5:32 AM on October 8, 2024 [1 favorite]