20 Best Garden Designs, by Tim Newbury

While I would not necessary think that these 20 garden designs in the book are necessarily the best ones I have ever seen (since I read a lot of books on gardens), I do think that the gardens chosen are fantastic and that they are fantastic for very worthwhile reasons.  What makes this gardening book particularly interesting is that all 20 of the gardens are chosen with different themes and for different reasons.  Now, not everyone is going to have a use for these designs, and quite a few of the designs are contradictory to other designs in terms of the yards included, but at the same time there is likely to be at least one aspect of this book that is going to apply to one’s situation that may provide a template for what someone can do with the yard that they have, and that is always worthwhile.  Sometimes one simply needs to have an idea of what can be done with a space for one to find one’s own ideas, and this book definitely is the food for imagining what a garden could look like with a bit of care and attention paid to it, so there’s that.

This book is about 100 pages long and it provides exactly what the title promises, 20 excellent garden designs with different themes in mind.  Perhaps one would prefer a garden that has year-round interest (1), or focuses on flowers (2) or foliage (3).  Maybe one has a garden that one wants to be productive and ornamental (4), or that is meant to complement a small cottage (5).  Perhaps one wants a romantic town garden (6) in a small amount of space or a private city garden (7) to provide some quiet space in the crowded urban world, or perhaps one wants a formal garden (8).  Or maybe one wants a modern water garden (9) or has a stream (10) that one wants to use in one’s gardening, or has an interest in either Mediterranean (11) or Oriental (12) gardening principles.  This book can help one develop a woodland garden (13) or a natural garden (14) or a small courtyard (15), or even a low-cost family garden (16) for the budget conscious.  There is a town garden for entertaining (17) as well as a sheltered roof garden (18) here as well, and the book closes with a long, narrow-walled garden (19) and a front garden (20), after which there is a general index and an index of plants and acknowledgments.

One thing that makes this book particularly wonderful is the way it shows a lot of photos about how the gardens were made and what they were made from.  There is a great deal of interest in the way that the landscape designers figure out how a particular plot of land (or even spot on a roof) can serve as a place for a fantastic garden.  There really aren’t very many sort of spaces that this book doesn’t show in a gorgeous light, whether one has a narrow plot of grass beside one’s house, or a courtyard in the city, or a rooftop, or a yard next to the wetlands or with a stream running through it.  And if one doesn’t have land of one’s own to work with, or even a convenient roof to turn into a lovely if somewhat lightweight garden (to keep those dead loads low on the building below), then one at least knows friends or loved ones that would be able to benefit from a work like this and come up with some ideas.  And that is really what a book like this is for, to provide enough templates that someone can find something that works for one’s own space, and to dream of the parties one is going to host there or the nights spent enjoying the view from one’s house or yard.