Big Ideas for Small Gardens
Carol Bucknell and Sally Tagg
Penguin Group (NZ)
RRP $45.00
This book, from garden designer and writer Carol Bucknell
and garden photographer and artist Sally Tagg, is a good companion to their Contemporary Gardens of New Zealand,
published (Penguin Group) last year.
This new book deals with small spaces while last year’s dealt with
mostly vast spaces but both are concerned with design and space management,
whatever the scale.
The first chapter details seven small gardens as complete
examples and the following chapters take the reader through suggestions for
specific areas and requirements, e.g. boundaries, shelter, containers,
furniture and art and decoration. Each
chapter ends with a list of key points which summarise the contents and makes
it easier to pinpoint the use of each section as they include some very
specific information.
The final chapter is a very useful plant directory which
covers all garden situations.
There are some new techniques to learn here, such as pleached
trees, which involves trimming the foliage of the plants so they look like
hedges on stilts, and cloud pruning which is difficult to describe but the
foliage of each branch is pruned to a tidy cloud shape, both resulting in a very
pleasing effect as the excellent photographs show.
The gardens are predominantly various shades of green, with
very little colour, other than white, and this seems to create more space and cool,
enveloping areas. One particular plant
used very effectively, in a pot, is a weeping citrus. It is in flower and looks magnificent. You can imagine the perfume it must bring to
the garden.
The photography is very appealing and encouraging but
unfortunately some of the white captions do not stand out very well against
their background which makes them difficult to read but it is a minor quibble
of a very well presented and informative book.
Dawn Forbes gardens in a very small space in Auckland and is an occasional reviewer on this blog..
No comments:
Post a Comment