Accent Your Garden: Creative Ideas from America's Best Gardeners (Fine Gardening Design Guides) [Paperback]

Fine Gardening (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Fine Gardening Design Guides | Publication Date: January 9, 2002

In this inspiring book, the experts at Fine Gardening deliver practical advice and innovative ideas for designing with garden ornaments. More than 15 talented designers show how to use fences, walls, arbors, fountains, pathways and other structures to create gardens bursting with beauty and interest.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The broad notion of "accent in the garden" is explored from different perspectives in this useful addition to the Fine Gardening Design Guides. Fundamentally, a fourfold approach is used to present ways to individualize an outdoor space. Walls and fences, paths and patios are key elements in distinguishing a setting. Ornamentation is suggested for creating drama, and garden structures are used to amplify displays of roses and vines, as well as to add an architectural presence. Contributors write with authority and enthusiasm, offering numerous projects for do-it-yourselfers. Look for high-quality photography, a signature of Fine Gardening magazine, and illustrated, step-by-step instructions for creating lovely features, such as wood arbors and metal trellises. Alice Joyce
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Taunton Press (January 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1561585564
• ISBN-13: 978-1561585564
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,079,996 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Depends on what you need..., February 25, 2003

By 

Patricia Tryon (Longmont, CO United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Accent Your Garden: Creative Ideas from America's Best Gardeners (Fine Gardening Design Guides) (Paperback)

If you have a large (at least a half acre; preferably more) garden, the scale of many of the projects in this book will make sense to you and you would probably find rating this book any less than five stars to be a kind of joke. After all, the photographs (as expected from anything associated with Taunton) are superb and there are drawings clear enough to help you develop your own plans for arbors, paths, and other structures. If, like me, you have a very small garden (5-6000 square feet) onto which you struggle to impose some kind of order so that the whole thing does not devolve into a nursery-like display of perennials or a hardware store-like show of a picnic table and benches, you will probably not find much of use here -- one star, at best.

Managing scale so that things look neither too ditzy nor over-stuffed in our little space is what I have most trouble piecing together. In this book I really was not able to find any help. From the rolling lawns which provided setting for many of the photos, I inferred that the scale probably is not right for my back 4.5; these are projects for a back 40 or more. What I wanted was a book to help me develop a way of thinking about accents in my very small garden, a way of working creatively within limits.

What the book provides is a series of projects for gardeners who are working on a large scale -- although they, too, might wish for something in addition to the discrete articles to help them develop an overall vision, a way of assuring that these structural additions accent and not overwhelm.