Handmade Garden Projects: Step-by-Step Instructions for Creative Garden Features, Containers, Lighting and More - Softcover

Forkner, Lorene Edwards

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1604691859 ISBN 13: 9781604691856

Publisher: Timber Press, 2011

Synopsis

Your journey to a made-from-scratch outdoor space starts here.

Transform your yard into a beautifully personalized retreat with 30 step-by-step projects! The finished pieces include creative pathways, unique support structures, DIY water features, clever containers, and special finishing touches that help bring your garden to life. With easy to follow instructions, lush color photography, and sidebars filled with helpful tips and additional ideas, Handmade Garden Projects is an inspiring step toward a more stylish space. 

About this title

About the Author

Lorene Edwards Forkner lives, works, and gardens in Seattle, Washington. She is the editor of Pacific Horticulture, a position that affords her the opportunity to continually explore stories about West Coast gardens and the people who tend them. Get in touch via ahandmadegarden.com and @gardenercook on Instagram.

From the Back Cover

You can transform your garden into a handmade, personality-infused oasis. Author Lorene Edwards Forkner—part eco-friendly non-traditionalist, part crafty creative with more ideas than money—will show you how.

Projects run the gamut from eye-catching structures, like a pergola made from plumbing pipes, to imaginative details, like a tree-hung chandelier for nighttime ambiance. You’ll also find helpful plant guides to accompany projects: delectable herbs to fill a stacking container tower, stellar succulents for a vertical gutter garden, glorious flowering vines to climb a bamboo obelisk, and so much more. Ready to get started? All you need are refreshingly simple materials—hardware store basics, salvaged goods, repurposed castoffs from cluttered basements—along with a little do-it-yourself spirit.

With clear instructions and inspiring variations on every theme, this book is easy to follow and easy to love. Your journey to a made-from-scratch outdoor space starts here.

Reviews

As unique as a fingerprint . . . handmade gardens reveal the creative vision and personality of the gardener in charge. Creating outdoor spaces of character, comfort, and fun involves scouring garage sales, your own garage, and building-salvage yards with such recyclables as broken ladders (for climbing flowers) and follies, fanciful outbuilding features like the tiny vintage trailer in Forkner’s Aluminum Garden surrounded by silver, green, and white plantings. Landscaping foundations—ground-level pathways and patios with pebbled mosaic accents or mown-lawn labyrinths—draw the eye upward to industrial rock-screen trellises and scrap-metal window ledges supporting planters. Old water jars and catch-basin sections become fountains; plumbing-pipe pergolas sport canvas drop-cloth awnings; industrial light fixtures contain outdoor terraria; and old shutters are turned into shelf storage/plant stands. Each project comes complete with lists of needed materials and tools, instructions, and recommended plantings. Whimsy is the watchword here, even as Forkner provides full-color photos, practical conversion tables, hardiness zones, and resource listings in this innovative addition to DIY creativity. --Whitney Scott

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I’m a handmade gardening gal—part eco-friendly, non-traditionalist, part crafty creative with more ideas than money. My garden is my canvas, my vision, and my voice. A place where I am free of all rules, except those of Nature herself. It’s where I make my unique mark on the world.

As kids we did this intuitively. My friends and I dug holes and pinched herbs from the neighbor’s garden for imaginary feasts of chives and rhubarb. We carved trails in the blackberry underbrush and wrecked a fair amount of havoc on the landscape; did you ever make confetti from the stripped leaves of a cotoneaster? Works great! Pleasantly tired, thoroughly filthy, and completely blissed out, we fought off the dusk and parental calls to come indoors at the end of the day for a bath and bed. Begging for just a few more minutes, we could hardly bear to tear ourselves away from our muddy adventures—even if it was just until morning when we tumbled outdoors again, ready for another day of discovery.

Fast-forward to today. Somewhere along the garden path, outdoor fun and games have been hijacked by yard work. Demanding work schedules and responsibilities barely leave time for weekend mowing and blowing; boring, tedious, onerous jobs more like dusting and vacuuming than play.

Or, maybe you’re like me: I fell for gardening—hard—with a passion known only to the truly plant-obsessed. From antique sweet peas to heirloom bulbs and the latest, greatest annual, I wanted them all. For thirteen years I was the owner and operator of a small specialty nursery called Fremont Gardens; a great way to scratch my acquisitive itch. What’s more, I live in the Pacific Northwest, land of fertile soil, a benign climate, and more horticultural heroes and zealots than you can shake a hard-to-find, double-flowered, winter-blooming hellebore at. I was in good company and we reveled in a veritable horticultural heyday—until the weight of our garden chores nearly killed us.

There’s far more to gardening than purchasing plants and following the latest design trend. When was the last time you just goofed off in the garden; lolled in long grass or played house outdoors? Now that you’re finally old enough to stay up past dark, why not watch the moon rise and witness the mysterious nighttime garden as it comes alive with heady fragrance, powdery moths, and unfamiliar noises?

I hope that this book—part idea inspiration and part instructional DIY guide—motivates you to get outside and craft your own personal landscape. You’ll find a collection of clever, easy-to-make projects that convert basic hardware store materials, found objects, and the occasional bit of basement debris into distinctive garden furnishings with a modern sensibility and resourceful spirit. Craftsmanship and the expected level of construction expertise definitely fall on the make-do/can-do end of the spectrum with no sacrifice in the sophistication of the final result.

You might be surprised to discover that chapter 1—“Getting Started”—includes an exhortation to clean the garage. While that may not sound very playful, with a little indoor digging you may discover that you already own a great deal of everyday goods, scraps, and raw materials just waiting to be recycled, repurposed, re-envisioned, and imaginatively put to use in the garden.

Starting with the very foundation of your landscape, chapter 2 spotlights projects that accessorize and ornament pathways , patios, and even the lawn. Chapters 3 and 4 look at design and decor features that focus the eye and make up the heart of the garden with gathering spaces and creature comforts. Clever containers and stylish finishing touches—chapters 5 and 6—take your yard way beyond uniformity to a beautiful, one-of-a-kind space that’s abundantly productive, comfortable, and entertaining. To help you manage the garden with style and efficiency, chapter 7 includes projects, tips, and practices focused on organization and storage.

Crafting projects with made-from-scratch ingenuity is easy, thrifty, and as much fun as those carefree days of yesteryear (and not nearly so hard on the cotoneaster). These days I cultivate a delicious vegetable garden where ornamental grasses and highbrow perennials once ruled. Overcrowded shrub borders have been supplanted by a generous fire circle and a tiny wooden deck furnished with a handmade cocktail table. Though my yard is still filled with lush plantings, it’s no longer a tiger I have loosely by the tail. Today my garden fits my life and I’m having a blast.

Whether you have acres of land, a simple city-sized lot, an apartment balcony, or even just a somewhat sunny windowsill, I’ll show you how to transform your little patch of the big outdoors into a refreshing, unique garden paradise.

Go outside—it’s a nice day!
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Timber Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1604691859
• ISBN 13: 9781604691856
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224