Here are 100 books that 1,000 Garden Ideas fans have personally recommended if you like
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I love gardening and learning about unusual plants but I find that many gardening books don’t provide a lot of useful advice. I grow over 3,000 different types of plants and have a background in chemistry and biochemisty. I teach gardening to new gardeners and garden design to more experienced gardeners. My students want to learn practical things like solving pest problems and growing plants with more flowers. I am always on the lookout for books that provide them with hands-on practical advice they can use right away.
I have known Lee Reich through his writings for a number of years and I find his books factual and practical. He simplifies gardening down to some basic principles and then tells you exactly how to copy his style in your own garden.
Pruning can be a daunting task for those who have not done very much of it, but it can be quite straightforward. In The Pruning Book, Lee simplifies the process of understanding why you need to prune something and then he shows you exactly when and how to do it.
It sounds simple enough, but pruning can confound even the most competent gardener. This new edition of Taunton's award-winning book explains the dos and don'ts of cutting back; from humble houseplants to the most amazing exotics, readers learn how to make the right cut the first time, every time. With straightforward prose, over 250 photographs and 135 drawings, this essential reference walks gardeners through the process of pruning everything from ornamental trees and bushes to topiaries and bonsai. This demystifies the timing and techniques that result in the most successful pruning for healthy growth and good form. Updated with the…
I love gardening and learning about unusual plants but I find that many gardening books don’t provide a lot of useful advice. I grow over 3,000 different types of plants and have a background in chemistry and biochemisty. I teach gardening to new gardeners and garden design to more experienced gardeners. My students want to learn practical things like solving pest problems and growing plants with more flowers. I am always on the lookout for books that provide them with hands-on practical advice they can use right away.
Trees and shrubs – the woody plants – form the backbone of any garden and most gardeners only have room for a small number of them. It is therefore important to pick the best ones for the location you have. Dirr's Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs is the best woody plant book available. It is full of hundreds of pictures and detailed plant descriptions. Michael Dirr is considered a global expert on these plants and he has grown many of them and speaks from personal experience. That is rare in encyclopedia-style books on plants.
The text reflects the passions of the author and gives full details of the plants, from the latest nomenclatural changes to revisionist thinking on the ever-expanding limits of cold hardiness. Mike Dirr is a legend in the horticultural world, widely acknowledged as a leading expert on trees and shrubs for landscapes. Add to that more than 3500 color photographs, and indispensable backmatter lists for choosing exactly the right plant for the right purpose, and you have an unsurpassed resource for tree and shrub identification and selection, one that will be embraced by garden designers, landscape architects, urban foresters, park managers,…
I love gardening and learning about unusual plants but I find that many gardening books don’t provide a lot of useful advice. I grow over 3,000 different types of plants and have a background in chemistry and biochemisty. I teach gardening to new gardeners and garden design to more experienced gardeners. My students want to learn practical things like solving pest problems and growing plants with more flowers. I am always on the lookout for books that provide them with hands-on practical advice they can use right away.
I am a plant collector and love growing unusual plants, especially perennials. When I first picked up The Explorers Garden, many of the plants in it were new to me. I fell in love with Daniel Hinkley and his plant selections and have now grown many of the plants in this book.
Unlike many perennial books that all show you the same 100 common plants, this book is full of plants nobody else talks about. Daniel Hinkley travels the world to discover new plants and describes some of the best in this book. These plants are uncommon, but many are now available in better nurseries.
Dan Hinkley's quest for distinctive plants has led him on expeditions to China, Korea, Nepal, Chile, and remote areas of North America. "The Explorer's Garden: Rare and Unusual Perennials" presents the most fascinating perennials found during Hinkley's treks around the globe, describes the assets each plant brings to the garden, and explains how it is best cultivated and propagated. Illustrated with Hinkley's own splendid photographs as well as those of Lynne Harrison, this new paperback edition includes a new preface by the author and a completely updated list of sources for plant material.
I love gardening and learning about unusual plants but I find that many gardening books don’t provide a lot of useful advice. I grow over 3,000 different types of plants and have a background in chemistry and biochemisty. I teach gardening to new gardeners and garden design to more experienced gardeners. My students want to learn practical things like solving pest problems and growing plants with more flowers. I am always on the lookout for books that provide them with hands-on practical advice they can use right away.
My favorite garden style is the Japanese garden. It is a simple refined style that is so peaceful and over the years I have learned that you don’t need to turn the whole yard into a Japanese garden. What I do now is use elements of this style in various parts of the garden. The book, Japanese Gardening, will provide you with great insight into various styles of Japanese gardening and make it easy for you to do the same. Add a Japanese walkway into a normal garden and make it special. Or use some of the minimalistic plants to add a calming feeling. This book will give you many great ideas.
This inspiring book offers expert information on how to create the perfect Japanese-style garden in any location, large or small. It presents the history of Japanese gardens and the principles underlying them. Sections on the five classic Japanese garden styles (pond gardens, dry gardens, tea gardens, stroll gardens and courtyard gardens) explain their key characteristics with practical tips on how to achieve them. Fifteen projects for creating complete Japanese gardens follows, with clear explanations, illustrations and gorgeous photography. A plant directory then details the various types of plants with advice on flowering habits and hardiness, while the final section outlines…
As an expert in grass ecology and champion of sustainable design, John Greenlee has created meadows not only in the United States, but throughout the world for over 30 years. Some of his most notable gardens include the Getty Museum, the Norton Simon Museum in Los Angeles, and the savannas at Walt Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida. In addition to his consulting and design work for commercial and residential clients, John Greenlee enjoys sharing his knowledge by giving several presentations and lectures throughout the year on the use of natural lawns, native grasses, and meadow restoration.
I think this book is one of the best organized and easily digestible garden books out there.
Whether you are a seasoned professional garden designer or just a beginner, this book is essential for helping understand how to put plants together in the garden. Roy’s simple and effective methodology can benefit any gardener's attempts to design successful perennial borders without a lot of jargon or pretension.
Roy’s book is both inspiring and informative. Roy’s influence is felt through some of the Midwest’s finest gardens and his maintenance knowledge can benefit any perennial garden, anywhere.
We’ve all seen gorgeous perennial gardens packed with color, texture, and multi-season interest. Designed by a professional and maintained by a crew, they are aspirational bits of beauty too difficult to attempt at home. Or are they?
The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden makes a design-magazine-worthy garden achievable at home. The new, simplified approach is made up of hardy, beautiful plants grown on a 10x14 foot grid. Each of the 62 garden plans combines complementary plants that thrive together and grow as a community. They are designed to make maintenance a snap. The garden…
By Isa Hendry Eaton and Jennifer Blaise Kramer
Author
Why are we passionate about this?
We are garden designer Isa Hendry Eaton and lifestyle writer Jennifer Blaise Kramer, co-authors of Small Garden Style. We love getting and sharing inspiration on good garden design to pull our lives more outdoors. In our book, we show you how to use good design to create a joyful, elegant, and exciting yet compact outdoor living space for entertaining or relaxing. Our stylishly photographed guide is a fun way to create lush, layered, dramatic little gardens no matter the size of your available space, be it an urban patio, a tiny backyard, or even just a pot by your door.
We love a garden book that works hard as a guide, and this book does just that!
It’s a handbook that feels like a trusted magazine with real-life garden tours and lifestyle tips such as “Steal This Look” (our fave!) for everything from stone and ironwork to plants and water features. We couldn’t appreciate more the way an author can break down a garden’s style and feel and help us replicate that look we love at home.
Gardenista is a go-to when we want a design refresh!
Our homes' outdoor spaces can and should be as welcoming and carefully considered as our living rooms; when treated as extensions of our homes, these spaces enrich our lives immeasurably. That was the guiding principle when, under the direction of editor in chief Michelle Slatalla (whose New York Times style columns were weekly must-reads for a decade), the team behind Remodelista.com launched sister site Gardenista.com. Like Remodelista, Gardenista caters to an older, more established audience (75 percent of readers are over the age of 35) and is known for its sophisticated, well-edited aesthetic. The book contains lushly photographed tours of…
By Isa Hendry Eaton and Jennifer Blaise Kramer
Author
Why are we passionate about this?
We are garden designer Isa Hendry Eaton and lifestyle writer Jennifer Blaise Kramer, co-authors of Small Garden Style. We love getting and sharing inspiration on good garden design to pull our lives more outdoors. In our book, we show you how to use good design to create a joyful, elegant, and exciting yet compact outdoor living space for entertaining or relaxing. Our stylishly photographed guide is a fun way to create lush, layered, dramatic little gardens no matter the size of your available space, be it an urban patio, a tiny backyard, or even just a pot by your door.
As plant lovers who live in Santa Barbara, where succulents and aloes are ever-present, we love this book as it feels like a big authority on such a specific subject.
The book offers a crash course in choosing and planning succulents, and reading it makes even a novice feel like an expert. In addition to learning plant names and growing tips, Baldwin offers fun ideas like covering the top of a henhouse with low-maintenance plants.
Plus, the book is bursting with color, so every page is a visual thrill.
"Designing with Succulents is inspiring, practical, and complete-a treasure for any gardener who loves these otherworldly beauties." -Kathleen N. Brenzel, Sunset Succulents offer dazzling possibilities and require very little maintenance to remain lush and alluring year-round. No one knows them better than the Queen of Succulents, Debra Lee Baldwin. This new, completely revised edition of her bestselling classic is a design compendium that is as practical as it is inspirational. Designing with Succulents shares design and cultivation basics, hundreds of succulent plant recommendations, and 50 companion plant profiles. Lavishly illustrated with 400 photographs, you'll find everything you need to visualize,…
We’re Chantal Gordon and Ryan Benoit — the cofounders of gardening/design/DIY blog The Horticult. Our site shows you how to create handsome yet effective habitats for your plants. That includes a collection of mounted staghorn ferns under our citrus trees, a vertical garden for your herbs, and a sleek bog for carnivorous pitcher plants. One of our most popular DIYs is how to build an outdoor theater behind your rosemary hedge. We show people how to create outdoor spaces they can deeply enjoy — whether it’s a patio, balcony, or yard. A key to welcoming someone is good design. The more you like hanging out outside, the better care you’ll take of your plants.
As primarily ornamental gardeners, we’ve fallen back on the old excuse about tomato plants being ugly as the reason why we don’t do edible gardening. It’s a lazy excuse! The Beautiful Edible Gardenshows that its titular premise is so not an oxymoron. And it hits the two things we look for most in a garden design book, which are: (1) hyperspecific plant recommendations and (2) solid design principles we can learn from and put into action. Through lucid, inviting instructions and scrumptious photos, The Beautiful Edible Gardenoffers gold like how to select “anchor plants” to establish structure in a landscape, blueberries and culinary sweet bay being top picks. And the transformational effect of planting a “focal point” plant — which has us hankering to bring in a persimmon tree.
Learn how to artfully incorporate organic vegetables, fruits, and herbs into an attractive garden design with this stylish, beautifully photographed guide.
We’ve all seen the vegetable garden overflowing with corn, tomatoes, and zucchini that looks good for a short time, but then quickly turns straggly and unattractive (usually right before friends show up for a backyard barbecue). If you want to grow food but you don’t want your yard to look like a farm, what can you do? The Beautiful Edible Garden shares how to not only grow organic fruits and vegetables, but also make your garden a place of…
By Isa Hendry Eaton and Jennifer Blaise Kramer
Author
Why are we passionate about this?
We are garden designer Isa Hendry Eaton and lifestyle writer Jennifer Blaise Kramer, co-authors of Small Garden Style. We love getting and sharing inspiration on good garden design to pull our lives more outdoors. In our book, we show you how to use good design to create a joyful, elegant, and exciting yet compact outdoor living space for entertaining or relaxing. Our stylishly photographed guide is a fun way to create lush, layered, dramatic little gardens no matter the size of your available space, be it an urban patio, a tiny backyard, or even just a pot by your door.
It’s hard to find a good garden book that’s useful and yet gorgeous enough to keep on the coffee table. We found these two to be wildly true in The Art of Outdoor Living, which is stunning and aspirational, with full-page photos of outdoor spaces that have a dream-like quality.
We want to step into many of the book’s vignettes, from gravel courtyards to cozy fireplace pits to patios designed to perfection. Best of all, there are high to low tips, so while it reads aspirational, it also has an approachable quality to it, which makes us want to curl up with a cup of coffee by the outdoor fire pit we’re now suddenly dreaming up!
Pools made private by lush plantings, bedrooms open to the back yard, bar seating by the outdoor oven. California native and exterior architect Scott Shrader is known for creating covetable outdoor rooms for clients including Ellen DeGeneres and Patrick Dempsey. In his first book, he shares the grounds of twelve beautiful properties, all designed to be lived in and enjoyed as extensions of the homes they surround, rich with creature comforts. Shrader shows us how to connect the landscape outside with interior decor; resulting in an exterior environment that flows naturally, stylishly and serenely from this core. He also inspires…
As an expert in grass ecology and champion of sustainable design, John Greenlee has created meadows not only in the United States, but throughout the world for over 30 years. Some of his most notable gardens include the Getty Museum, the Norton Simon Museum in Los Angeles, and the savannas at Walt Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida. In addition to his consulting and design work for commercial and residential clients, John Greenlee enjoys sharing his knowledge by giving several presentations and lectures throughout the year on the use of natural lawns, native grasses, and meadow restoration.
This book is perhaps the most important garden book of the last twenty years and one of my favorites.
The main premise is that plants matter and that the key to successful gardening and garden design is to know your plants and I could not agree more! I love the gorgeous photography and all the information by two of America's greatest horticulturalists.
For too long, garden design has given pride of place to architecture, artifice, and arbitrary principles. The results? Soulless landscapes where plants play subordinate roles.
With passion and eloquence, Scott Ogden and Lauren Springer Ogden argue that only when plants are given the respect they deserve does a garden become emotionally resonant. Plant-Driven Design shows designers how to work more confidently with plants, and gives gardeners more confidence to design. The Ogdens boldly challenge design orthodoxy and current trends by examining how to marry plantsmanship and design without sacrificing one to the other.
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