Price : $27.75

Product Description

Chosen and described by celebrated garden designer Penelope Hobhouse

Features stunning photographs by distinguished garden photographers including Jerry Harpur, Andrew Lawson, Clive Nichols

Published in association with an exhibition at the Chicago Botanic Garden

Great Gardens of the World is a survey of some of the greatest gardens of the world, presented through magnificent photographic images and the descriptions of legendary garden designer and writer Penelope Hobhouse. Here is shown the oases of the Middle East, the gardens of Chinese scholars, Japanese sages and Renaissance humanists, French baroque gardens, the English landscape garden of Capability Brown and his followers. Here too are the gardens of the great modern designers, among them Roberto Burle Marx, Fernando Caruncho, Dan Kiley, John Brookes and James van Sweden.

Penelope Hobhouse is internationally renowned as a gardener, writer and garden designer. The author of many classic works including Colour in your Garden, Garden Style, Penelope Hobhouse On Gardening , and Penelope Hobhouse’s Garden Designs (all published by Frances Lincoln), and Plants in Garden History, The Story of Gardening and Gardens of Persia

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-02-23
A wonderful book, with beautiful and inspiring pictures. Always a pleasure to go back again and again at its pages.

Review date : 2007-11-24
Gardens are meant to be paradise on earth. The idea of paradise as a garden has a long history, even before the Garden of Eden was presented in the Bible. What the paradise looks like, there is hardly specific description. The description of the Garden of Eden was not very specific either, yet it gave the garden designer some ideas.

In every culture, garden designers seek paradise through their own creative ways. Penelope Hobhouse, one of the most talented garden writers of our time, started her tour of paradise on earth in Asia: the serene naturalistic gardens and symbolism in China, and the Zen gardens and tea gardens in Japan. She then took us to continental Europe: the hilly regions of Italy where lavish gardens are balanced with the use of axes and symmetry, and gardens in Germany, Netherlands and Russia, as well as the climax of formal gardens, the French gardens.

Penelope Hobhouse’s next stop is England. She discussed in detail the naturalistic Landscape Gardens, the Cottage-style Gardens, and the Eclectic Gardens. She also explored Mediterranean gardens and gardens in America: European influences and naturalistic gardens.

Last but not least, Penelope Hobhouse discuss today’s gardens: water in gardens, gardens and nature, selecting right plants for right sites, reclaiming and revitalizing, and roof gardens, etc.

To Penelope, an ideal garden is "at the balance point between human control and untamed nature."

"Great Gardens of the World: In Search of Paradise" has 240 pages and many beautiful interior color photos. It is a fine garden book that every garden lovers should have.

Gang Chen, Author of "LEED AP Exam Guide" & "Planting Design Illustrated." LEED AP, AIA

Review date : 2006-12-06

The ideal garden we are given to understand is a paradise – "a haven of comfort, abundance, and beauty." Many of us try to achieve that paradigm in our own way, as have countless others before us. Now gathered in one gorgeous volume are the results of those endeavors gleaned from diverse cultures and climes.

We begin our armchair tour with "Gardens Through the Centuries," a journey covering four thousand years beginning with the earliest gardens alive in the deserts of the Middle East. The first Mughal Emperor Babur (1483 – 1530) had a number of gardens including the Garden of Fidelity which was divided into four parts with a central pool.

Of course, the gardens designed in China and Japan expressed a respect for nature, evidenced in vast areas where the placement of each stone had meaning. Places for contemplation, stroll and moss gardens were found in Japan.

For this reader what can compare with the gardens of Italy? Hadrian’s Villa near Tivoli boasts open porticoes, enclosed atriums, fountains, basins, statuary. It is a wonder. La Mortola on the Italian Riviera is a place for dreaming with a steep slope to the sea rich in agaves, aloes, white roses, salvias and citrus trees. A virtual Eden on earth.

Ms. Hobhouse continues our tour with a look at modern garden design as represented by such designers as Roberto Burle Marx, Fernando Caruncho, and Beth Chatto.

"In Search of Paradise" holds 240 pages and 200 illustrations all in glorious color contributed by the world’s foremost garden photographers.

The is a volume to be savored and returned to again and again.

- Gail Cooke

Price : $21.94

Product Description

Once maligned as a swampy outpost, the fledgling city of Chicago brazenly adopted the motto Urbs in Horto or City in a Garden, in 1837. Chicago Gardens shows how this upstart town earned its sobriquet over the next century, from the first vegetable plots at Fort Dearborn to innovative garden designs at the 1933 Worlds Fair.
Cathy Jean Maloney has spent decades researching the citys horticultural heritage, and here she reveals the unusual history of Chicagos first gardens. Challenged by the regions clay soil, harsh winters, and fierce winds, Chicagos pioneering horticulturalists, Maloney demonstrates, found imaginative uses for hardy prairie plants. This same creative spirit thrived in the citys local fruit and vegetable markets, encouraging the growth of what would become the nations produce hub. The vast plains that surrounded Chicago, meanwhile, inspired early landscape architects, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen, and O.C. Simonds, to new heights of grandeur.
Maloney does not forget the backyard gardeners: immigrants whocultivated treasuredseedsand pioneers who planted native wildflowers. Maloneys vibrant depictions of Chicagoans like Bouquet Mary, a flower peddler who built a greenhouse empire, add charming anecdotal evidence to her argumentthat Chicagos garden history rivals that of New York or London and ensures its status as a world-class capital of horticultural innovation.
With exquisite archival photographs, prints, and postcards, as well as field guide descriptions of living legacy gardens for todays visitors, Chicago Gardens will delight green-thumbs from all parts of the world. (30081123)

Price : $18.78

Product Description

Inspirational, practical, and easy to use, this book was created with the aim of conveying the awesome diversity and beauty of California’s native plants and demonstrating how they can be brought into ecologically sound, attractive, workable, and artful gardens. Structured around major California plant communities–bluffs, redwoods, the Channel Islands, coastal scrub, grasslands, deserts, oak woodlands, mixed evergreen woodlands, riparian, chaparral, mountain meadows, and wetlands–the book’s twelve chapters each include sample plans for a native garden design accompanied by original drawings, color photographs, a plant list, tips on successful gardening with individual species, and more. Both residential and professional gardeners will learn the benefits of going native with gardens that require less water and fewer fertilizers, attract wildlife, engage the senses, create a sense of place, and, at the same time, preserve our rich natural heritage.
Designing Native California Gardens includes:
* More than 600 selected native species recommended for the garden
* More than 300 photographs of native plants, natural plant communities, and residential native gardens
* Recommended places to visit for viewing each plant community

Customer Reviews

Review date : 2008-06-08
I was looking for a book that would give me a comprehensive guide to xeriscaping with native plants. This book contains one section that approaches my needs but is more of an overview over the native plants of the many diverse vegetation zones of the states. For what it is, it is a nice book. Just not a match for me.

Review date : 2007-11-18
This book is a must have for the California native gardener. I’d say the book’s biggest strength is in its’ inspiration- contains nice photographs of natural landscapes and gardens modeled after them. It groups plants by communities which is nice, though maybe hard to do. I know I live in an area which doesn’t fit exactly into of any of the communities they list, but I can still get the idea they are trying to convey, and look around at what is in my community. California is so diverse you almost want a bunch of more specific and in-depth books for different areas inside California, but I guess maybe those areas of interest are too small to sell enough books to make it worth the while.

It does a good job listing different kinds of plants, my only complaint with this book is that I would have liked more pictures accompanying each plant for which information is given- because you really can’t tell from the brief physical description what the plant looks like. As someone else has mentioned, this book is best paired with California Native Plants For The Garden. However, this complaint should be taken with a grain of salt, for designing a California native garden I think this book is the best on the market. Together, these two books provide the backbone to build your California native plant book collection around.

Review date : 2007-11-14
Love this book, gets you to think in terms of plant groupings & not just on a singular level.

Review date : 2007-10-10
-We need more books like this to make Native Gardening more amenable. What "Landscapers’ Challenge" did for Landscaping, this book will hopefully start to do to open up the still rather arcane world of Native Plants. It is practical and full of detailed, appropriate, high quality photographs of sample materials. Visually on par with "Landscape Plants for Western Regions" by Perry.

Review date : 2007-09-26
This book is excellent, with many good photographic examples of complete native landscape. It also set for an excellent philosophy for landscape design for the both the use of native and non-native plants. However it really shouldn’t be thought of as a complete source for native gardening. I would also suggest that you pick up ‘California Native Plants for the Garden’ by Carol Bornstein, David Fross, and Bart O’Brien. Even between these two books all of the possibilities for beautiful California native plants and landscapes created using them have not yet been fully explored, but these books are an excellent start.