The New Garden Designer: How to Design Useful, Beautiful Gardens from Start to Finish

In The New Garden Designer's Handbook, Daryl Beyers guides gardeners and budding designers through the process of planning useful, beautiful gardens, large and small, from start to finish. 

Complete with step-by-step instructions, detailed illustrations, and over 20 prototypical design plans, this practical, easy-to-follow primer describes how professional garden designers think and work, followed up with expert advice on how to evaluate a design, develop a reasonable budget, and get going on implementation.   

Gardeners will learn how to:

• Conduct a site survey, determine the scope of the design, create a base map and complete design drawings. 
• Assess and work with diverse landforms and their corresponding soil type and drainage issues.  
• Choose, create, and implement an array of built structures that make outdoor spaces useful and beautiful. 
• Design with plants by developing a plant palette complete with trees, shrubs, perennial flowers, ornamental grasses, annuals, tender perennials, and bulbs.
• Put it all together into a comprehensive design plan!

Daryl Beyers is Gardening Certificate Program Coordinator at the New York Botanical Garden, where he helps shape the continuing education department’s gardening curriculum, and teaches the capstone Fundamentals of Garden Design course. With over three decades of professional landscaping experience, specializing in residential garden design and development, he has created and cared for hundreds of gardens throughout the United States. He authored two special issues on garden design for Fine Gardening magazine, was a contributing garden editor for Martha Stewart Living, and his articles on gardening and garden design appear regularly in Horticulture and other national publications. Daryl continues to provide design expertise for client gardens while maintaining an active public speaking schedule and honing his gardening and design skills at his home in Shasta County, California.