Apr 26th, 2010
Small Spaces, Beautiful Gardens
Small Spaces, Beautiful Gardens
Price: $12.47
Small Spaces, Beautiful Gardens
Product 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.Amazon.com Review
Keith Davitt’s Small Spaces, Beautiful Gardens celebrates the possibilities for awkward, undersized garden parcels, demonstrating convincingly that no space is too small to make a big impact. Lacking dimensionality, most small gardens can be taken in visually with one glance. Davitt offers solutions for creating a sense of spaciousness and surprise, even in the most cramped, unlikely location.
A landscape designer, builder, photographer, and writer, Davitt draws on 16 projects from his own portfolio. “Before” and “after” photographs help illustrate both the process and principles of reconfiguring an outdoor space. Who could imagine, for example, that as ugly a duckling as a narrow, shaft-like urban lot surrounded on three sides by cinderblocks, painted brick, and metal piping could be transformed into an enchanting series of multi-leveled wood decks, enlivened with container plantings?
Davitt’s ideas are all the more convincing because he has photographed the gardens between peak bloom periods. Although spaces are lush with plant life, the book’s emphasis is more on design than plant selection. Offering neither budget remedies nor step-by-step technical advice, Small Spaces, Beautiful Gardens is, itself, a beautiful book to pore over for inspiration. –Jennifer Wyatt
Small Spaces, Beautiful Gardens
Small Spaces, Beautiful Gardens
esp for urban small gardens – he makes you think you can do it!
Star Rating: 5 / 5
Looking for ideas for some small gardens and outdoor spaces for some new homes I am building. This book offered very little support.
Star Rating: 3 / 5
Standard spaces I might see set up at a garden show. Nothing spectacular.
Star Rating: 3 / 5
I’ve searched in bookstores for appropriate books for a very small garden, to no avail. This book gives outstanding ideas for making a small space seem larger as well as more inviting. Of particular interest are the summaries (based upon the material reviewing each garden) as well as the “before” pictures that accompany the article (giving hope to those with bleak bare spaces). Also, there are drawings that show the overall concept for each garden, which provides a context for the individual photographs.
Highly recommended.
Star Rating: 5 / 5
The title says it all. Amazing what you can do with such little space. Beautifully illustrated with before and after pictures, step by step explanations and level of complexity.
Star Rating: 5 / 5