cover image Cultivating Garden Style: Inspired Ideas and Practical Advice to Unleash Your Garden Personality

Cultivating Garden Style: Inspired Ideas and Practical Advice to Unleash Your Garden Personality

Rochelle Greayer. Timber Press, $35 (320p) ISBN 978-1-60469-477-2

Columnist and blogger Greayer offers a kaleidoscope of gardening schemes to help amateur gardeners give identity and style to their outdoor living space. Her eclectic combination of refurbishing, arts and crafts, and landscape design create new possibilities for the garden to become a living extension of home decor. For example, the section “Cultivated Collectors” re-envisions plant display with a creative cluster of bromeliads spilling from the drawers of an antique library card file. The section on the garden for “Bohemians” introduces airy ethereal plants such as tall verbena and cow parsley to lend elegance to a quirky garden scheme. Even so, it is not all about the plants. Arranging outdoor space also involves knowing the correct way to hang and best position a tire and use the right outdoor fabric on the patio furniture. The extravagant use of color photos on each page brings visual clarity to otherwise improbable schemes. Whether depicting “retro rockery,” topiary, trellising, Danish or Zen features, the book offers needed guidance for designing outdoor space in a way that helps gardeners bring unique personality to their living, growing outdoor decor. (Sept.)