The Intimate Garden: Twenty Years and Four Seasons in Our Garden
Husband and wife Gordon and Mary Hayward invite readers to learn from their mistakes and triumphs throughout two decades of creating and tending to their home's one and a half acres of gardens. The land outside their old Vermont farmhouse was once overrun with brambles, buried beneath abandoned cars and hidden under rotted mulch. Together, the Haywards designed a set of connected yards and gardens—complete with sitting and dining areas, water features, topiaries and outdoor sculpture—that mixed the indigenous New England landscape with Mary's English upbringing. This is not a project-by-project how-to book but rather a detailed look at the techniques the Haywards used to create their own gorgeous garden. Their methods promise to help amateur landscape designers create spaces that are unique, personal and harmonious with the surroundings. Using their own garden as an example, the Haywards demonstrate the importance of controlling edges, lines, transitions and focal points. Two hundred color photographs, including seasonal shots and before-and-afters, offer proof of the effectiveness of the Haywards's intuitive design philosophy.(Feb.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.