4 comments about Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden.

1. If you are new to gardening but want classic borders, this may not be the book for you. To understand this book, you need to have a thorough understanding of garden plants, especially those that are grown in England. This is not a "plug and play" kind of book. Here's an sample:
   "The undergrowth of such a group may be of Solomon's seal at the back, and, if the bank or border is in the sun, of a lower groundwork of Iberis and Corydalis ochroleuca, or, if it is shaded, of Tiarella, woodruff or Anemone sylvestris. With these, for the sake of their tender green foliage, there may well be Uvularia grandiflora and Epimedium pinnatum."
   If you didn't follow that sample, and understand the subtlety of composition here, imagining the composition of color, plant form, leaf texture, moisture and sun requirements, and seasonal variation, you'll need several good plant books and visits to arboreta to understand this book. There aren't photographs to illustrate the prose. It would be even more difficult to translate this into your specific garden.
   
   That being said, it is fascinating to read Jekyll's own words, and even more so to see her drawings. Each plan is augmented by watercolor which helps in understanding. Each plan could take hours of study to begin the understand the genius of Jekyll. I agree with another reviewer in that it was a mistake to eliminate the scale on the drawings.



2. A very enjoyable read Gertrude Jekyll was the great female designer who has been lost to wider public



3. For those who are truly crazy about making and playing in flower gardens, this Gertrude Jekyll book is one of the best. It's not a practical how-to book. Few gardeners will share the climate she was writing about, or have her enviable resources, like a tidy trust fund, 10 acres and a small staff of gardeners. Ms. Jekyll was the most famous garden writer of her day, producing many books in addition to writing articles and designing a lot of high-end residential flower gardens.
   
   This book is a fascinating and surprisingly relevant record of how she contrived her own flower gardens a hundred years ago. There are detailed planting plans of her gardens, drawn by her, and also some fantasy garden designs. In addition to the classic flower border (which she had a strong hand in inventing) there are designs for bulb and annual flower gardens, and many, many other ideas for landscaping. If you think the gardens of an elderly lady in England a hundred years ago would be filled with washed-out colors and fussy ornaments, you are in for a huge surprise.
   
   Like Russell Page's 'The Education of a Gardener', this is the chance to get inside the mind of a great artist: how they think, how they see, and how they tranlate their insights into garden design. As originally published (with plan drawings and photos by Ms. Jekyll) her original is an all time classic.
   
   I'm not completely enthusiastic about this edition. Some plant names are updated (fine), many color pictures are added (nice pics, but none of Ms. Jekyll's gardens), modern watercolors of plants mentioned in the copy are scattered about (OK, but more decoration than education) and a few additional Jekyll designs not included in the original book were added (very nice).
   
   Negatively, they edit her plan drawings a bit, coloring them in, and removing the original scale marking, so you can't tell how big the beds are. The coloring will help those not super-familiar with plant names to get the jist of the designs. They have also removed some of her original B&W photos. That's not good. I'm sorry I lent my original version to someone and lost it.
   
   This edition is a colorful and largely satisfying replacement, but I will probably try to hunt up a true reproduction of the original. I'd rather get a clearer version of Ms. Jekyll's voice.



4. As an Engish Gardener "displaced in Kansas" this book was a delight. Anyone who wants to plan a garden large or small should turn to this little gem written over 80 years ago. Miss Jekyll was the definitive garden planner, her ideas of colours and seasonal planting will inspire you to create a beautiful garden of your own. Quite the best of her kind.

No comments about Britain in View.

No comments about The Italian Garden.

No comments about Cities in a race with time;: Progress and poverty in America's renewing cities.

No comments about Urban Design Review: A Guide for Planners.

No comments about Landscape Architecture.

No comments about The Garden Planning Kit: An Interactive Guide to Designing, Planning, and Planting the Garden of Your Dreams.

No comments about The Architecture and Planning of Milton Keynes.

No comments about Guelph Lectures on Landscape Design.

1 comments about The Garden As Architecture: Form and Spirit in the Gardens of Japan, China, and Korea.

1. The highest compliment which I can pay to a book is to say that it has a place in my "Desert Island" library - that is to say that if I were to find myself stranded on an island and could only have a few books on a given subject, this would be one of them. The Garden as Architecture is such a book; it is fascinating, well-written and profusely illustrated, and is lucid enough to be enjoyable the first time but sufficiently rich and complex in it's material that it continues to yield additional insights after repeated re-readings. It consists of a cross-cultural comparison of the relationships between architecture and the adjacent outdoor spaces, in the traditional cultures of Japan, China and Korea. I use the term "outdoor space" rather than "garden" because the author makes the point that these 3 cultures differ significantly in the use and meaning which they give to these spaces, which use of the word garden for all 3 does not adequately convey. The section on Japanese gardens and architecture is somewhat longer than the Chinese and Korean sections; it alone is worth the price of the book. The author describes the evolution of residential and temple architecture (starting with Heian-period Shinden style estates and proceeding thru the Shoin and Sukiya styles of the medieval and Edo periods) as well as the changes which occurred in the adjacent gardens. He shows that architecture and the gardens appear to have changed together as part of a mutually-dependant co-evolution, rather than having evolved independently of one another. For example, he describes how as a result of changes in the design of the shutters (shitomido), doors (mairado), and shoji screens used to screen the exterior from the interior of the building, the views of the garden were dramatically altered over time, which influenced the design of the garden. Elsewhere he argues that the south dry-landscape gardens of the Zen temples and the pond-and-hill gardens of warrior residences both evolved from the same prototypical Heian-period Shinden south garden by a process in which certain elements of the latter were emphasized (while others were condensed or retained only by implication rather than explicitly), with the later gardens differing from each other by what was chosen for emphasis. This is a fascinating idea because it is very similar to the process of idealization and abbreviation which many authors have used to describe the relationship between the Japanese garden and the larger natural landscape. The sections on Chinese and Korean gardens are more concerned with the influence of geographic/climatic and social factors than they are with their evolution over time. I'm not sufficiently versed in these subjects to comment on them except to note that the material in these sections is equally interesting, and concerns a subject about which little has been published in English compared with the volume of material on the Japanese garden & architecture. Since the Chinese and Japanese gardens were strongly influenced by Taoism and Zen respectively, the differences between them provide a degree of insight into the contrasting philosophies of these two religions. I have only one minor complaint concerning this book. The numbering of the illustrations is complex and at times confusing, and they are widely separated from the text which discuses them with distressing frequency - expect to be flipping the pages a lot. On a final note, you will get the most out of this book if you already have some familiarity (from more introductory sources) with the subjects covered. The illustrations are all in black & white, so a good large format color book (e.g. by Marc Keane or Teiji Itoh) on Japanese gardens would make an excellent companion, while the visual and spatial arguments in this book can be appreciated more deeply after having worked thru David Slawson's "Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens" (which is also in my "Desert Island" library).