Gardens Adirondack Style

After a career photographing America's most spectacular gardens for magazines, Loughrey's handsome volume of upstate New York gardens serves as a history of Adirondack landscapes as well as a visual record of their charms. Herbaceous borders, animal-shaped topiaries and heavily pruned English boxwoods typified gardens at the dawn of the twentieth century, when wealthy tourists flocked to the Adirondacks, hastening the development of grand hotels and an influx of the talented gardeners who created the immaculate gardens of the historic resorts around Lake George and the sprawling garden oases separating the Millionaire's Row mansions. Moving on to contemporary gardens, Loughrey shifts her focus to individual properties, including the short-seasoned vegetable gardens of the Lake Clear area, the North Country's daylily-rich summer retreats and Lake Placid's lush ""Gold Medal Gardens."" Loughrey offers detailed topiary information so home gardeners can replicate the dramatic results contained within these pages, and a thorough resource guide lists information on nurseries, garden clubs, resorts and landscape design services tailored to the New England gardening style. The book might offer enough escapism to satisfy gardeners unable to personally tour the world class gardens the book chronicles, and Loughrey's historical account of each property adds a rewarding counterpoint to this lavishly illustrated book.