Gardentopia: Design Basics for Creating Beautiful Outdoor Spaces
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
“Gardentopia is that rare marriage of the art of landscaping and the technical knowledge of how to compose a landscape—boiled down to readily understood and easily executed actions. This book puts you in the driver’s seat and shows you how to chart the course to your own personal garden utopia.” - Margie Grace, Grace Design Associates
Any backyard has the potential to refresh and inspire if you know what to do. Jan Johnsen’s new book, Gardentopia: Design Basics for Creating Beautiful Outdoor Spaces, will delight all garden lovers with over 130 lushly illustrated landscape design and planting suggestions. Ms. Johnsen is an admired designer and popular speaker whose hands-on approach to “co-creating with nature” will have you saying, “I can do that!’
This info-packed, sumptuous book offers individual tips for enhancing any size landscape using ‘real world’ solutions. The suggestions are grouped into five categories that include Garden Design and Artful Accents, Walls, Patios, and Steps and Plants and Planting, among others. Whether you are an experienced gardener or a landscaping novice, Gardentopia will inspire you with tips such as ‘Soften a Corner”, “Paint it Black”, and “Hide and Reveal”.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers with even the slightest interest in beautifying an outdoor space large or small should find something of value in this expansive guide from landscape designer Johnsen (The Spirit of Stone: 101 Practical & Creative Stonescaping Ideas for Your Garden). She emphasizes the importance of deciding upon a goal for a garden and visualizing its final appearance before beginning work on it, declaring that the sum of any such project is greater than its parts. Johnsen takes care to dissect these parts, revealing creative possibilities (accompanied by practical guidance) for each nook and cranny. For example, to recover the lost art of "garden strolling," the design can include a widened, curving walkway that coaxes the stroller through a garden's various turns and twists. With proper planning and plant placement, the garden will "reveal itself in stages, hiding and offering up its delights in turn." Cedar steps on a wooded hillside can function similarly, offering an insect-resistant feature that helps set the pace of traversing the garden. Replete with eye-popping color photos, detailed explanations, lists of the tools required, and creative ideas, Johnsen's guide will be, for avid and committed gardeners, a gift that keeps on giving.
