garden design books

Introduction

More than two millennia ago, Roman statesman, orator, lawyer and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero purportedly said, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” For me, these words still ring true today.

From the ancient Orto Botanico de Padova in Northern Italy, which featured medicinal plants, to Piet Oudolf’s elevated railway garden on the High Line in New York City, the idea of cultivating plants has fascinated nearly every society since the birth of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution.

At the same time, the spread of printed literature—from the Library of Alexandria in Egypt to Oxford University’s vast Bodleian Library to the gloriously restored Rose Reading Room in New York’s main public library—has given us a treasure trove of books about gardens and garden design.

When I set out to learn about the finest books on garden design, I asked James Braydon Hall, the president of the Garden Conservancy, to share some of his favorites. The first writer he cited, Thomas Jefferson, may surprise some readers who know Jefferson primarily as a Founding Father and U.S. president. But as Hall points out, Jefferson was a “scientist, statesman, explorer, and gardener.” His Garden and Farm Books (c. 1802) provide a glimpse of early nineteenth-century American gardening and farming while also showcasing Jefferson’s view that horticulture could play a key role in shaping the new nation and its inhabitants.

Fast-forward a century, Hall told me, and delve into novelist Edith Wharton’s vision of grand American gardens as heirs to the European aristocratic gardening tradition. In Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904), Wharton helped to shape a Gilded Age vision of American upper-class life—in Hall’s words, presenting gardens “as visible symbols of power and as enormous symbolic canvases upon which to play out the rituals of their milieu.”

In our own time, Michael Pollan captures the spirit of the post-modern approach to gardening in his Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (2003). As Hall says, Pollan “brilliantly takes on the self-conscious fashion for gardening among post-urban intellectuals,” which often takes the form of a search for personal, rather than cultural meaning.

Many of the designers whose ideas are captured in this book have also found inspiration in books by master gardeners. In our conversations and in their essays, several names appeared again and again—including Beth Chatto, Russell Page, and Christopher Lloyd. It’s well worth spending some time with these luminaries of twentieth-century garden design, whose influence is still apparent today in gardens around the world.

Chatto, the subject of a recent biography by Catherine Horwood and the author of numerous books, was a pioneer of environmentally friendly gardening techniques, emphasizing the importance of choosing plants not only for their visual appeal but also for their suitability to the local conditions. She urged gardeners to look at the whole plant, not just its flowers, and to observe it throughout the seasons, while remaining committed to the garden’s overall beauty and order.

The legendary gardener Russell Page also drew inspiration from the surrounding landscape and chose plants for their natural compatibility with the setting, while embracing an unabashedly formal design aesthetic. In his only book, The Education of a Gardener (1962, reissued by New York Review Books in 2007), Page described his early inspirations as well as the design process for some of his most famous commissions from the first half of the twentieth century, including estates in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Christopher Lloyd, author of 20 books and numerous articles about gardening, has long been viewed as an “artist” who transcended the traditional education he received as a horticulture student and at his parents’ English manor house to create original and unexpected designs. His gardens at Great Dixter, his family home, are world renowned, and his many books have left their mark on countless gardeners over the past half-century.

Through the evocative writing of the master gardeners who have contributed to this volume, new generations of designers and enthusiasts can draw aesthetic and practical inspiration. Amidst the bustle of our twenty-first-century world, Cicero’s two prerequisites for a fulfilling life—the garden and the library—resonate more than ever. It is my hope that this book can join these others on the shelves of devoted gardeners everywhere, bringing fresh insights from the many contributors who have shared their visions in these pages.

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Garden design: Margaret Brower Photo credit: Daniel Sager

Afterword

Thinking back to my earliest memory of a garden, I’m transported to the 1960’s in rural Pennsylvania, my maternal grandmother’s house in the last days of April, and Hyacinthus orientalis – the common hyacinth – in shades of purple, pink, and white.

While a novice by the standard of garden designers featured in this book, Mom-Mom had a true green thumb. Her front yard was tiny: some grass, and a strip of garden abutting the house that was the anticipated harbinger of spring, signaling the time to jettison heavy coats and snow shovels. When the hyacinths she planted broke ground and bloomed, you could smell them from the front porch of my family’s house next door; in fact, they were the signal my mother used to have the storm windows removed and replaced with summer screens.

Mom-Mom’s backyard was a small plot of land that might have been a grass covered respite to sit in a folding chair and have an iced tea. But for my grandmother, it was her pride and joy: the vegetable garden.

Farthest back some 15 feet from the house were several rows of corn and sunflowers that obscured the view of her neighbor’s garage. Moving toward the house, a dozen or so beefsteak tomato plants were planted in a chevron pattern with conical cages to support the eventual weight of their fruit. Moving toward the back door in orderly rows were red beets, string beans, cucumbers, radishes, cabbages, carrots, peas, kohlrabi, pumpkins, and bib lettuce. Several varieties of coleus plants were interspersed for color, cuttings of which would be brought indoors to ‘root’ in repurposed jelly jars on the kitchen window sill. They would eventually be replanted in yard the following spring. A real circle of life.

As the family living next door, we were the welcome recipients of Mom Mom’s summer bounty from late June though the first frost. There was rarely a meal without something from her garden.

It wasn’t until the 1990’s until I found the pleasures of gardening that my grandmother knew so well, when I purchased a modest house built in 1822 on a dozen acres in Churchtown, New York. It had originally been a poultry farm owned by one Homer Anderson (the original map of the house, with his name inscribed on it, came with the deed).

The place was in disrepair, which was part of the allure of the property: I love a project. Rotted and paint-bare, most of the clapboards needed replacing. The septic system failed. The plumbing needed professional attention. The outdated kitchen and bath desperately needed an update. Every wavy float glass window needed re-glazing; the entire house needed rewiring. You get the picture.

Outside there was evidence of a once thriving garden, but the previous homeowner explained he had paid little attention to it in the dozen years he owned the house. Hundreds of Siberian iris came up in May, but were crowded by poison ivy, wild black caps, and chickweed. Several dozen mature lilacs were leggy with few if any flowers. Hydrangeas that didn’t bloom, periwinkle mixed with dandelion, and a stone wall barely visible through the thicket.

Like most novice gardeners, I rolled up my sleeves every Saturday morning that first spring and set about what I thought was an ordered list of tasks required to bring the garden back to glory. But not having done adequate homework, I made mistakes.

That poison ivy I mentioned? I had a perennial (pun intended) case. I planted several dozen variegated Hosta in full sun; they withered to craft-paper brown by July. On the hill behind the house, I decided there should be Baltic ivy as ground cover. My partner and I spent an entire weekend clearing the brush, augmenting the soil, and planting 2000 (!) rooted cuttings purchased by mail order. Imagine our surprise when pulling up to the house the following Friday afternoon to find a deer and her fawn grazing on what turned out to be the last morsels of a week-long, all-you-can-eat buffet.

Eventually I came to the conclusion I needed a garden designer.

On the advice of a neighbor I hired Philippe, a French expat who lived a few miles away. We spent 2 hours together every Saturday morning during the spring and summer season of the second year discussing the topography, the existing plants, a ‘rescue’ plan for the parts of the garden I liked, and ideas for new plantings. We made trips to Ward’s Nursery in Great Barrington, where Philippe shared his expertise in choosing the perennials and annuals best suited to the Catskill mountains.

By the end of my 4th year, with untold hours of enjoyable sweat equity, I had my garden. In fact, with Philippe’s tutelage I’d built a formidable stone staircase, one riser and tread every weekend over the course of 2 summers, which led to the plateau where we put the pool and pool house.

Now I don’t own that house anymore, but when I think back to my naivete in planning its garden, I wonder what it might have been like to have the advice of the finest garden designers in the world to guide me. How do you integrate architecture and garden? How important are scale and proportion? What if I want my garden to have a Japanese sensibility? What are the differences between a formal and an informal garden? I love roses, but how do I choose a variety?

That’s part of the reason I decided to do this book, so that when I buy my next house, I’ll have it in one hand, and a pruning shears in the other.

That, and to remember my grandmother.

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