Gardening With Style: A Private View of the World's Most Innovative Gardens

Describes and illustrates stylish gardens created by some of the world's most innovative gardeners, with information on planting, maintenance, and special features of each garden

"This book is about people who don't feel that a garden is a garden is a garden." To overleap convention, and avoid "designing in aspic," the 40 designers profiled here have wandered down many garden paths, some "ceremonial" and "ramrod straight" (American designer and Harvard professor Michael Van Valkenburgh), others beset with "the apparent anarchy of rampaging plants" (French landscaper Gilles Clement). From Australia to Long Island, N.Y.--where designer Jack Lenor Larsen has devoted 25 years to the painstaking construction of an African-style compound set on 27 acres of horticultural fantasy--the authors conspire to give us a reprieve from the "over-dominant lawn and herbaceous border." A portrait of untrammeled creativity, the book is irksomely illustrated with many out-of-focus, washed-out photographs; dotted with fey Briticisms ("the glottal songs of frogs"); and full of appetite for the stylishly far-fetched. King is a writer ( The Viceroy's India) and gardener, Ot te sen a gardening writer and Rose the gardening correspondent for London's Sunday Times .
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.