2 comments about Thomas Jefferson's Flower Garden at Monticello.

1. This book includes color photographs of the current gardens at Monticello and black & white reproductions of Thomas Jefferson's own sketched plans for the gardens. There is an annotated list of the flowers and "woody ornamentals," such as roses and shrubs, grown by Jefferson. There are many excerpts from his writing and letters which give the reader a greater sense of Jefferson's broad intellect and love of nature as it relates to his gardens. I was hoping to find a list of flowers native to Virginia cultivated by Jefferson but, while the origins of many of the flowers are indicated, there is no separate list of the native plants as I had hoped.



2. I found the book to be quite intersting and a valuable resource for the gardener. Thomas Jefferson is well known for his gardening efforts, both as ornamental and practical for food stuffs.

   The book has excellent photographs of the gardens of Monticello as well as Jefferson's drawings of how he wanted to landscape the area of his "Little Mountain." There is great pride in the book to document over one hundred species of plants cultivated by Jefferson while living at Monticello.

   Jefferson was a champion of cultivating indigenous plant life to Virginia and that of North America, but he had plants comming from thoughout the world also.

   Cultivating a mountain top graden presented problems for Jefferson in both climate and the proper hydration of the plants themselves. Without all of the modern conviences that we have today, Jefferson managed to have some of the most beautiful gardens in Virginia.

   This is a must book if you are looking for gardening proportion and scale. As Jefferson said, "There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me." Well said...

   In the book you will find very good descriptions of the plants grown at Monticello, this is a must volume for reference.

2 comments about Exploring Garden Style: Creative Ideas from America's Best Gardeners (Fine Gardening Design Guides) (Fine Gardening Design Guides).

1. In this book 20 garden designers share ideas and techniques for creating a beautiful garden in a unique style. The book is divided into three parts - Traditional Gardens, Naturalistic Gardens and Specialty gardens. Each part is composed of short, beautifully-illustrated articles written in a very personal style by a gardener, landscape designer or horticulturist.

   It is the personal nature of each article that contributes most to the appeal of this book. Take the opening of Nani Waddoups article titled "Tropical Garden, Temperate Zone". She writes "The newer parts of our garden look a little out of place..." How can you resist an opening like that? Her article describing her garden - listed in the Smithsonian Registry of Gardens - shows how her Hawaiian background prompted her and helped her to develop a lush pseudo-tropical garden in the Pacific Northwest.

   My favourite section is that on Naturalistic Gardens. Five writers form points as far apart as Connecticut and Texas share with the reader ways in which they used the local climate, geology, soil and plants to create a garden that has given each of them great pleasure and satisfaction.

   Top marks to the Taunton Press for introducing these garden writers first to Fine Gardening magazine and now in book form for those of us who like to sit down and read the whole collection. The editors have put together a book that offers gardeners a diversity of fresh ideas in a most attractive format.




2. Okay, I'm a sucker for gardening stories ... personal experiences of gardener's and their gardens. These are stories of real people and the evolution of their gardens. There are ideas here for everyone with great photos for inspiration and many stories include a layout of the garden. It makes for good browsing to get motivated to get out and work in the dirt to create my own special sanctuary.

1 comments about How to Price Landscape & Irrigation Projects (Greenback Series).

1. This is an invaluable resource for landscape contractors and anyone else who wishes to be successful in the landscaping business. Huston, an MBA who specializes in coaching landscaping companies of all sizes and specializations, explains the process of bidding jobs according to a pre-formulated yearly budget. His three phase bidding method is clearly explained and illustrated in numerous applications from residential landscape installation jobs, to large commercial maintenance jobs, to time and materials irrigation projects, and much more. In addition to these clear "how to" sections, it contains a wealth of information such as production rates and industry benchmarks, which will make it a valuable tool for the owner or estimator of any company throughout the company's lifetime. With this, as well as valuable explanations of company expansion scenarios and "exit strategies", I feel well equipped for success. I will never again be one of those creative types who must confess that I am "an expert in my art but I know nothing about business". Now I know a lot about both.

No comments about Toward Legacy.

1 comments about The Fragrance of God.

1. This book grows on a person. I liked it and will like it more. I gave it to gardeners I know who, in turn, really liked it. It puts gardening in contemporary play and worship reminding the one who gardens of the first commission to tend the garden, and so, also of the Master Gardener.
   
   Lovely. Probably one of the books I'll re-read annually.

No comments about Room Outside: A New Approach to Garden Design.

1 comments about New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape.

1. New Orleans is an "inevitable city on an impossible
   site" is what Pierce Lewis said in his book Making Of An Urban Landscape.
   
   I would add to that "an inevitable party on an impossible site by illicite and illogical people.'
   
   Most of what is there now was not there prior to WWII. The early settlers (1699) understood the land and built appropriately.
   
   If anyone is to blame it is the French! But it is a most wonderful book about the growth and development of a wonderful city.

2 comments about The Superintendent's Guide to Controlling Putting Green Speed.

1. Putting is where the game is won and/or lost. This is a fabulous book; well worth the price.



2. I am so glad there is finally a book out there that can extend your game using the knowledge of the importance of the green....Great book Ill carry it with me when I play....

5 comments about The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating A Sense of Place.

1. This is a wonderful book, and an important one, I think. It explains why some gardens touch us and how that sense of wonder is achieved in compelling gardens and maybe even in our own. It does not tell us what plants to plant or how deep to dig or what amendments to add to our soil. For me, it was a light bulb going on. Oh, so that's why I loved this or that on a garden visit! So that's why one thing or another seemed out of place or discordant. As the author describes and illustrates her five principles, it becomes clear what belongs in a garden and what doesn't and why it doesn't. She explains something about regional differences and indigenous materials and why some things just seem to fit in certain places. An additional bonus for me was that, as a resident of southeastern Pennsylvania, several of the public gardens and aboretums she uses as examples are familiar to me and allowed me to look beyond the photographs and into my own memory of the places she describes. The photos are, I should add, extremely well chosen and well placed within the text to illustrate her points. I have to admit that I borrowed this book from the library, but now I know I need to have it for my own.



2. Everybody recognizes and appreciates a beautiful landscape when they see it, but not many can tell you why the landscape is so aesthetically appealing. Claire Sawyers' book, The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating a Sense of Place, answers that question in clear understandable terms.
   
   Whether you have a small yard surrounding a townhouse, as I do, or extensive property, the principles Claire discusses apply equally well. Written in a clear, concise and non-technical fashion, and illustrated with numerous well-chosen photographs, Claire's book speaks to the entire range of gardeners from "keen plantsmen" and "serious gardeners" to those of us who just want our yard to "look good." This is not a book about selecting the perfect plants; it is about how to integrate your entire landscape into a coherent whole that is beautiful, satisfying and yours--your house, your yard, your plants, your mailbox, your garden shed, your driveway, your neighborhood.
   
   Each of the chapters that discuss the five principles is enlightening and educational. One of best things about the book is the final chapter in which Claire brings all of her principles together in her description of three very different, but equally lovely, landscapes. Whether you are new to gardening and landscape design or an experienced serious gardener, you'll learn something new and valuable in this book.



3. Review at www.gardendesignonline.com
   
   Claire Sawyers has been involved with plants and gardens for most of her life, and now, the director of the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College is pushing the development of a true American garden style.
   
   In her new book, The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating A Sense of Place (Timber Press, 2008), Sawyers says "we come up short when we try to identify the essence of the American garden." She believes that's perhaps because we haven't been making gardens long enough, or because we're still trying to define the American garden ethic.
   
   Sawyers urges all Americans to abandon what so many in this country like to do: install English or Italian or Japanese or Persian or whatever-else gardens in our unique United States landscapes.
   
   In the book, she outlines a five-step process to make our gardens authentically American, and scores of photos throughout the book illustrate each of her principles beautifully. She advises everyone to work with their own particular landscape, rather than struggling against it -- i.e., take your design cues from the natural rock outcroppings, open fields or natural forests already in place -- don't raze them in favor of formal terraces. This, Sawyers calls capturing "a sense of place."
   
   Next, she says designers should "derive beauty from function." Working with natural materials, she believes, enhances the American landscape: using natural stones for fences and walls in New England, adobe in the Southwest, and split-rail fencing in the hills of Virginia. Sawyers advocates designing pools and spas that are integrated into the landscape design so that they "don't look like a giant Caribbean tub dropped into the garden."
   
   Finally, she calls for the use of "humble materials," making sure that you "marry the inside to the outside," and "involve the visitor" in the garden experience. "Even on a small urban lot," says Sawyers, "garden paths can direct and encourage a visitor's experience and create a sense of journey."
   
   At the end of the book, Sawyers writes about several residential and public gardens that capture the spirit of a true "American garden," and she demonstrates how each one includes the five principles she outlines in the book. Among them area the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas and the Brandywine Conservancy River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
   
   Sawyers is not writing about some kind of design style that's one-size fits all for American landscapes like the "New American Garden" developed by James van Sweden and Wolfgang Oehme, with wide swathes of ornamental grasses, shrubs and perennials. The "American" garden that Sawyers envisions would be different in every region of the United States, yet have singular qualities that everyone could recognize as truly "American."
   
   If you're tired of English cottage gardens, Asian-style gardens and formal landscapes, as I often am, this is the book for you. It'll inspire you to think about how to create a landscape that's not only original, but one that will last through the American ages.



4. I had seen the author, Claire E. Sawyers, at this year's Seattle Garden Show and was very impressed with her presentation. The five principles will forever alter the way I think about elements of landscape design."Authentic" is a very appropriate word to describe her ideas, for you are considering your unique situation, not trying to replicate an Asian or European flavor. And I liked the notion of using a more basic material, if it works, rather than a more expensive material, just because it is expensive. I will not be placing this book in a garage sale; it is in my permanent library.



5. This is a nice book. The five "principles" are smart and sensible (if not brilliantly original), the photos are apt and attractive and the writing is clear (if humorless). But in illustrating each of her principles the author resorts to the approach taken by so many other gardening books -- an interesting driveway here, a creative clothesline there. And the tone is often annoyingly cranky, picking on current whipping boys like green meatballs and chain-store-bought marigolds. And one could nitpick. The author counsels the use of natives two pages after a lovely photograph of the Scott Arboretum (of which she's the director) that features an interesting assemblage of phormiums, elephant ears and other exotics. In one of her examples of using humble materials - the pebble garden at Dumbarton Oaks - she notes that that great estate was designed by Beatrix Farrand but fails to mention that Farrand didn't design the pebble garden and probably hated it. And dwelling on the two Taliesins and Fallingwater to explain how to figure out the "genius loci" of the reader's half acre suburban plot just isn't helpful. The book just doesn't seem to me to merit all those "five star" reviews. It certainly won't change my gardening life the way, say, Julie Moir Messervy's "The Inward Garden" did.

3 comments about The Feng Shui Garden: Design Your Garden for Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

1. I have had a necklace for years with the I Ching symbols, but I never knew their meanings. In this 228 page beautiful book, feng shui is explained beautifully and simply. For the first time I understand the elements and their relationship with energy, astrology and healing. Simply the best book I have read for novices like me who have admired the tranquillity and peace of oriental gardens but were unable to capture the techniques required to plan such a simple yet complex space.



2. I really like the color photos. She is very clear and informative as well as encouraging.It made me feel like staying home just to garden!



3. Gill Hale has done a nice job of introducing Feng Shui concepts, but I feel this book is perilously lacking in depth. OK for those who want to dabble because it's trendy, but not much else. Photos are good; basic design advice is sound. BUT as a Feng Shui landscape design consultant with several years experience I have grave reservations about anyone relying on this book for serious Feng Shui. Hale's grasp of many FS concepts seems superficial at best, and possibly harmful if not well understood when applied. For serious readers I strongly suggest instead Lillian Too's 'Complete Illustrated Guide to Feng Shui for Gardens', very readable, lots of good photos & diagrams.