Small Garden Books

Books to help you design beautiful gardens in small spaces.

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Big Ideas for Northwest Small Gardens

Book Description: For the gardener working in a front garden, parking area, narrow strip, tiny backyard, or condo balcony, this book offers plenty of possibilities. The author, whose weekly gardening column appears in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, shows how to make the smallest garden gorgeous, from extending planting areas with containers and installing compact water features to increasing a garden’s flower power by losing that lawn. 80 color photos are included in this colorful guide.

Big Ideas for Small Gardens

Book Description: Even the smallest garden can be transformed into an earthly delight when you know how to make the most out of limited square footage. Balconies, rooftops, townhouse patios, and postage-stamp-size front yards alike can yield spectacular results with the right focal point, plants, and an expert trick or two. Whether youre living in a new suburb or a dense metropolis, Big Ideas for Small Gardens offers inventive, attainable solutions, plus recommendations for plants and products that help maximize your space.

The City Gardener's Handbook: The Definitive Guide to Small-Space Gardening

Book Description: This books shows you how to tuck lush gardens into small entry ways and many other small spaces. Even if you have a large garden this book can show you how to liven up small nooks and crannies in your garden.

Courtyard Gardens

Book Description: Gardens enclosed by boundaries and open to the sky are special havens, offering respite from the outside world. Inspired by examples past and present, Courtyard Gardens shows how to create beautiful, secluded spaces for outdoor living.

Whether you are starting a new garden or transforming an existing one, you'll find a wealth of ideas here for small spaces dedicated to relaxation, entertaining and cooking, as well as gardening.

Creating and Planting Alpine Gardens
How to Build Small Rock Gardens and Work with Alpine Plants

Book Description Creating and Planting Alpine Gardens: How to Build Rock Gardens and Work with Alpine Plants introduces gardeners to time-tested ways of achieving success with alpines in North American growing conditions.

The author begins with descriptions of alpine sites and ways of handling rocks and building small gardens. He continues with information on growing alpines in troughs and tufa rock, other containers, raised beds, and alpine houses and frames. His opinionated discourse on suggested alpine plants is a treat and an inspiration.

Gardening in Small Spaces: Creative Ideas from America's Best Gardeners

Book Description: The eighth title in the Fine Gardening Design series illustrates innumerable techniques to make a little garden space go a long way. It shows how to create a garden that feels much larger than it is, and demonstrates how small gardens can create privacy. A look at sample gardens reveals some of the tips and tricks of gardening in small spaces, such as using diagonal lines and breaking areas into individual sections. Sound advice on pruning and selecting appropriate plants helps readers transform a small lot into a place of beauty and comfort. Featuring designs from some of America’s best-known landscape artists with over 100 color photos and illustrations, Gardening in Small Spaces is a great guide to creating a garden paradise with limited space.

Great Gardens in Small Spaces

This book has a California slant, but has many good design ideas to incorporate into a small Pacific Northwest garden.

Book Description: Great Gardens in Small Spaces features forty-four wonderful and exquisitely photographed California gardens, specifically treating the small garden, its particular challenges and its abundant opportunities and rewards. Most people do not have the luxury of grand estatelike spaces, but are confined to much smaller plots. This book is unique in its focus on rarely photographed, small, exquisitely detailed gardens of both northern and southern California, and encompasses gardens in the cities of Venice, Pasadena, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Laguna Beach, and Carmel, among others. Great Gardens in Small Spaces will show gardeners with limited space how to design beautiful oases on a compact yet fulfilling scale.

Japanese Gardening in Small Spaces

Small spaces lend well to a clean simple design of most Japanese gardens as well as Japanese designs fit right in the Pacific Northwest.

Natural Gardening in Small Spaces

Book Description: With the growing recognition that a wisely and sensitively planted garden has a lot to offer to wildlife and the food web, more and more people are looking for ways to make their gardens environmentally friendly. However, gardeners have tended to assume that to create habitats for wildlife, and evoke wild and natural places, you need a lot of space. In Natural Gardening in Small Spaces, renowned plantsman Noel Kingsbury refutes that presumption, showing how even in a small garden you can create a sustainable ecosystem that looks great --- and, once established, largely looks after itself.

Small Space Gardens

Book Description: A small garden can be beautiful, low maintenance, sheltered, intimate and fun. Good design, both inside and outside the home is timeless and is based on sound principles. Small Space Gardens takes you through the entire planning sequence, providing a progressive organizational sequence that melds interior, exterior and borrowed landscape into an elegant, practical and integrated whole.

The first chapter demonstrates how to analyze your existing space what you have in your garden already, what you want to keep and what you will need to introduce, from furniture to lighting techniques to walls and paths. This will help you decide what you want from your garden whether it is an eating area or play zone, herbs or barbeques. It then goes on to look at the planning of your new garden how best to maximize the space that you have. It shows how to use dividers, paths, walls and raised areas to create separate areas and hidden corners.

Many people think of plants and planting in the initial planning stages, when in reality it is the spatial framework which must come first. Once this is established, the planting can then breathe life into the garden, and the chapter on planting strategy will help you formulate a considered plan to create color, texture and atmosphere.

Small Buildings, Small Gardens

Book Description: Sitting in a vine-covered gazebo framing a lakeside view, walking under a pergola connecting an orchard and pool garden, having lunch in a summerhouse with lavender blooms in the foreground while roses scramble over the roof-variety is what engages visitors to a garden, and once you understand that garden design gathers around making places for people, then you begin to find just the right places for plants that will engage those people.

Built structures in a garden provide anchors, centers and starting places for good garden design. Features such as garden sheds, arbors, pergolas, gazeboes, trellises, fences, gates, bridges, decks, arches and small buildings-playhouses, summerhouses and pool houses-provide valuable clues as to how to develop gardens around them, and how using a variety of these structures can solve many design problems.

In Small Buildings Small Gardens, author Gordon Hayward teaches you his design process, which will help answer many questions about how to develop a design for your new or existing garden:

Where should I put a new bed?
How big should it be?
What shape should it be?
How does it relate to existing beds?
How should I plant this new garden so it fits in with those that already exist yet adds to the overall experience of my garden?

Packed with case studies of private gardens from around the world, Small Buildings Small Gardens offers practical, essential advice on siting built structures to help you gain the confidence in designing your own garden masterpieces.

Gordon Hayward is the author of several books, including The Welcoming Garden, The Intimate Garden: Twenty Years and Four Seasons in Our Garden, Garden Paths: Inspiring Designs and Practical Projects, and Your House, Your Garden: A Foolproof Approach to Garden Design, as well as a variety of articles for Horticulture Magazine. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont.

Small Spaces, Beautiful Gardens

Book Description: If you love gardens but don’t think you have enough outdoor space to cultivate one, this book is for you. Written by a 20-year veteran of landscape design, this imaginative guide features 18 hardworking profiles of gorgeous small garden paradises. Through step-by step instructions, before-and-after photos, and detailed plans, landscape architect Keith Davitt offers ingenious tips and techniques for creating the illusion of space through terracing, enlarging through dividing, adding texture and color, and more.

Keith Davitt has been designing, building, photographing, and writing about gardens across the U.S. and abroad for 20 years. He recently won the Herald Award for Excellence in Garden Communication, and his gardens and articles have appeared in numerous gardening magazines. He is also the author of the forthcoming Beyond the Lawn. He lives in New York City.

Urban Sanctuaries: Peaceful Havens for the City Gardener

Book Description: By presenting examples of innovative designs from both private and communal inner-city gardens all over the world, this book invites urban gardeners everywhere to create an inspiring outdoor haven no matter how limited available space may be.

As well as showcasing design ideas for varied styles of peaceful and refreshing inner-city gardens, Stephen Anderton offers practical advice on the basic design elements necessary to create any urban sanctuary, including a consideration of soil, light, space, scale, and water, together with plant use and appearance. Examples provided include low- maintenance minimalist gardens, family-friendly havens, gardens with soothing water features, roof terraces and balcony retreats, indoor-outdoor rooms, and natural style gardens. Designs and practical tips are given to create each of these different garden styles.

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