Product Description

Covers everything from the initial planning of your garden on paper to how to make your design a reality with planting, laying and construction guides. This single book will tell you everything you could need to know to achieve your ideal garden. Includes: * how to assess your site, create a style and source materials, * advice on planting schemes and achieving year-round interest, * tips on working with design principles such as scale, proportion and balance, * simple instructions for hard landscaping. Alan Titchmarsh imparts a lifetime of expertise in these definitive guides for beginners and experienced gardeners. Step-by-step illustrations and easy-to-follow instructions guide you through the basic skills and on to the advanced techniques, providing everything you need to create and maintain your dream garden.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56878 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

About the Author
Originally trained at Hertfordshire College of Horticulture and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Alan Titchmarsh is the author of over 40 books about gardening, including How to be a Gardener Book 1: Back to Basics, the fastest-selling of all time in the genre, and the bestselling The Kitchen Gardener: How to Grow Your Own Fruit and Veg. He writes for BBC Gardeners' World Magazine, and is gardening correspondent for the Daily Express and Sunday Express. He has presented Gardeners' World, the annual coverage of The Chelsea Flower Show and Nature of Britain, and has his own daily chatshow.

Customer Reviews

A no-fuss guide to garden design that's packed with ideas
When I first saw this book, I thought it was going to be a re-packaged chunk from "How to be a Gardener", especially as it's also out of the BBC Books stable. How wrong I was.

This guide to garden design might be relatively thin in its number of pages when compared to other garden design books (which tend to weigh in at the heavier end of the scale), but it's pitched just right for anyone with a blank canvas or major garden re-vamp on their hands and struggling to know just where to start.

The first part of the book deals with the principles of design such as site survey and levels, but also including a look at particular styles such as cottage gardens. A quick guide to hard landscaping techniques then follows, though anyone contemplating a major hardscaping project may need much more detail or the services of a professional in order to ensure success. Just under half of the book is devoted to plants - designing with them, planting for the seasons and solutions for particular areas such as shade, damp, dry and windy.

About a third of each double page spread is devoted to photographs and line drawings to both inspire and inform, thus making a book that is packed with information and ideas.