Fundamentals Of Garden Design eBook

This is a book on garden design, plain and simple. It is meant to be a practical guide to those who would like to learn to create landscapes that relate to the land and the home, whether it is your home or that of a client.
To many the idea of a “designed” garden is alien, unwelcome and generally left to grand houses and estates. Many of us live on smaller plots and if you stop and think about it, the smaller the space the more important it is to design carefully so as not to waste any precious ground.
Garden design is about ideas and creativity.
For those of us who design, it is about seeing beyond the imaginations of our clients and presenting them with a plan that is more than they could have dreamt of. That’s our job.
The Egyptians and Romans planned their homes and gardens together. The Italians of the Renaissance developed design to a fine art creating outside living rooms, dining areas, corridors and entrance halls. With borrowed lines and materials from the house and plants, stone and water from nature, they reached a subtle compromise between the touch of nature and the hand of man.
Sound familiar? It should – it’s what you read about all the time and see in magazines today.
This is not a book overly concerned with the planting of a garden but rather how to plan the garden. What makes a good layout? Since form follows function, we’ll explore what makes a garden function well. We will delve into the underlying principles of garden design in ways that are constructive, useful and easy to understand. It will show what people wanted and how we helped them bring it to reality.

“To weigh, advise, interpret, integrate, and come up with some answers beyond the ability and imagination of the layman is the role of the landscape architect.”
Thomas Church
Gardens Are For People