Skip to content

BOOKS: Garden design explored

Garden Design by Heidi Howcroft and Marianne Majerus, Firefly Books, 320 pages, $50. For anyone seeking to create their own sanctuary in the garden where they live the choices can seem overwhelming.
  • Garden Design by Heidi Howcroft and Marianne Majerus, Firefly Books, 320 pages, $50.

For anyone seeking to create their own sanctuary in the garden where they live the choices can seem overwhelming.

Choosing the correct plants, understanding the soil, considering the local climate and many other decisions are daunting. But the joy of gardening comes often from the learning process of trying different things and even if it doesn't work out the experience adds to your overall knowledge.

Author Heidi Howcroft and photographer Marianne Majerus want to help with those choices and together they have produced an extensive book of ideas that are beautifully presented and cover an enormous variety of gardens.

Starting with the basics they explain, along with plenty of photographs, what questions you should begin with.

From there they expand into elements of style and move on to look at structures, paths, and the wide choices of stones and the impact they can have on presentation.

With hundreds of photographs and accompanying descriptions there is a wealth of ideas here to draw on for your own garden creation.

 

  • The Irish Garden, by Jane Powers, Frances Lincoln Limited Publishers, 400 pages, $65.

There is nothing like the lush green foliage throughout Ireland.

The unique climate there has created the opportunity for an enormous variety of plant growth. This environment led to the creation of fabulous gardens, some dating back hundreds of years.

More than 50 amazing gardens are featured in this stunning collection. Author Jane Powers provides all the details of the history and evolution of the gardens while photographer Jonathan Hession captures their beauty in a series of striking images that follow them through the seasons.

Travelling to locations in both the Republic and Northern Ireland we are given an exclusive behindthe-scenes tour of the gardens.

They range from the enormous Powerscourt in County Wicklow with its massive terraces and gardens that originated in the 1700s, to the Glebe Gardens in County Cork where Jean and Peter Perry have created an organic garden from cattle grazing fields that is now a tourist attraction due to its incredible beauty and productiveness.

Hession's photographs show the grand expanses but also the smaller details that combine to give an impressive rendering of the essence of each garden.