Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Big Ideas for Small Gardens - review by Dawn Forbes


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..

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