The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating A Sense of Place [Hardcover]

Claire E. Sawyers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2007

What makes a garden authentic? For American gardeners, this question can be vexing. Because America is a comparatively young nation, it hasn't had much time to develop an indigenous garden style. Gardeners have tended to turn to other national traditions—such as Italy's, Japan's, or England's—for inspiration. The unhappy result of this piecemeal stylistic borrowing has been the creation of gardens that bear no relationship to local landscapes and history, and that have no connection with our daily lives.

Clair Sawyers shows this tendency can be reversed: how we can create gardens that are both deeply rooted in their surroundings and deeply satisfying to their creators and owners. Drawing on her knowledge of a vast array of American and foreign gardens, she identifies five principles that help instill a sense of authenticity: capture the sense of place, derive beauty from function, use humble or indigenous materials, marry the inside to the outside, and involve the visitor.

Practical and inspiring, The Authentic Garden will enable the reader to make a garden that is true to a specific time, place, and culture; to capture and reflect an authentic spirit so that the garden, in turn, will nurture the spirit of those who cherish and dwell in it.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

English cottage borders, Japanese serenity havens, classic Italian vistas: all have been primary sources of inspiration for America's public and private gardens, yet there is no need for homegrown gardeners to look to foreign lands for guidance. To do so is, in Sawyers' view, inauthentic, and she offers a series of core propositions designed to aid gardeners in creating outdoor spaces that are faithful to their native surroundings and embody horticultural reflections of American culture. From evaluating available spaces to incorporating functional elements to utilizing modest materials, adhering to Sawyers' well-considered ground rules will encourage home owners to coordinate indoor and outdoor areas while simultaneously enabling visitors to feel more than a casual sense of attachment to the landscape. Helpfully demonstrating the reality behind such lofty concepts through in-depth analysis of quintessential American public gardens, such as the Lady Bird Johnson Wildlife Center in Austin, Texas, and noteworthy private gardens from Pennsylvania to Arizona, Sawyers offers a stimulating landscape study. Haggas, Carol

Review

“Ms. Sawyers thinks that admirers are drawn to certain traits, moods or emotions in other cultures’ gardens. And, she adds, they don’t dissect those underlying characteristics adequately. For example, gardeners may be drawn to a Japanese lantern. But the quality to translate into a personal garden is tranquility, rather than the specific object itself.”

The Bulletin

“Sawyers shows how we can create gardens that are both deeply rooted in their surroundings and deeply satisfying to their creators and owners.” - Sierra Heritage Magazine

"If you consider yourself a conscientious consumer, one who tries to tread lightly on the earth, then the ideas Claire Sawyers presents in her elegantly written book, The Authentic Garden, will resonate with you."The American Gardener (American Gardener )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 285 pages
• Publisher: Timber Press (December 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0881928313
• ISBN-13: 978-0881928310
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 7.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #673,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born on a dairy farm in Maryville, Missouri, I treasure the time I spent growing up playing with puppies, riding horses and helping my grandparents in their vegetable garden.
When my father became the Far East Director of the American Soybean Institute, my family moved to Japan, where I lived for 6 years and attended 5th-10th grades at the American School in Japan near Tokyo.
I returned to the mid-west to major in ornamental horticulture at Purdue University, in Indiana. As an undergraduate, I had internships at Kingwood Center, in Mansfield Ohio, and Longwood Gardens, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania and I also returned to Japan to spend a semester working with Japanese gardeners. After graduating, I spent time--a year-- in Europe, working at Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium, a garden famous for witch-hazel introductions, followed by stints in 2 private gardens in France, one in Normandy, one in Brittany.
I then went back to graduate school at Purdue to study horticultural editing and tissue culture. I continued graduate school studies at the University of Delaware where I was a Longwood Graduate Fellow studying public horticulture in a unique program sponsored by Longwood Gardens.
The Delaware Valley is rich with public gardens, so following graduate school I've stayed in the region, first working at Mt. Cuba Center, a public garden devoted to native plants, where I worked for 7 years, and then in 1990 I became the director of the Scott Arboretum, the campus of Swarthmore College, just outside of Philadelphia, a position I still enjoy today.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So That's Why I Love the Gardens I Do, January 16, 2008

By 

Meredith Bradbury (Malvern, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating A Sense of Place (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful book, and an important one, I think. It explains why some gardens touch us and how that sense of wonder is achieved in compelling gardens and maybe even in our own. It does not tell us what plants to plant or how deep to dig or what amendments to add to our soil. For me, it was a light bulb going on. Oh, so that's why I loved this or that on a garden visit! So that's why one thing or another seemed out of place or discordant. As the author describes and illustrates her five principles, it becomes clear what belongs in a garden and what doesn't and why it doesn't. She explains something about regional differences and indigenous materials and why some things just seem to fit in certain places. An additional bonus for me was that, as a resident of southeastern Pennsylvania, several of the public gardens and aboretums she uses as examples are familiar to me and allowed me to look beyond the photographs and into my own memory of the places she describes. The photos are, I should add, extremely well chosen and well placed within the text to illustrate her points. I have to admit that I borrowed this book from the library, but now I know I need to have it for my own.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but a bit disappointing, May 19, 2008

By 

Big Al (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating A Sense of Place (Hardcover)

This is a nice book. The five "principles" are smart and sensible (if not brilliantly original), the photos are apt and attractive and the writing is clear (if humorless). But in illustrating each of her principles the author resorts to the approach taken by so many other gardening books -- an interesting driveway here, a creative clothesline there. And the tone is often annoyingly cranky, picking on current whipping boys like green meatballs and chain-store-bought marigolds. And one could nitpick. The author counsels the use of natives two pages after a lovely photograph of the Scott Arboretum (of which she's the director) that features an interesting assemblage of phormiums, elephant ears and other exotics. In one of her examples of using humble materials - the pebble garden at Dumbarton Oaks - she notes that that great estate was designed by Beatrix Farrand but fails to mention that Farrand didn't design the pebble garden and probably hated it. And dwelling on the two Taliesins and Fallingwater to explain how to figure out the "genius loci" of the reader's half acre suburban plot just isn't helpful. The book just doesn't seem to me to merit all those "five star" reviews. It certainly won't change my gardening life the way, say, Julie Moir Messervy's "The Inward Garden" did.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American Gardens: The Real Thing, March 28, 2008

By 

Jane Berger "Publisher, GardenDesignOnline.com" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating A Sense of Place (Hardcover)

Review at www.gardendesignonline.com

Claire Sawyers has been involved with plants and gardens for most of her life, and now, the director of the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College is pushing the development of a true American garden style.

In her new book, The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating A Sense of Place (Timber Press, 2008), Sawyers says "we come up short when we try to identify the essence of the American garden." She believes that's perhaps because we haven't been making gardens long enough, or because we're still trying to define the American garden ethic.

Sawyers urges all Americans to abandon what so many in this country like to do: install English or Italian or Japanese or Persian or whatever-else gardens in our unique United States landscapes.

In the book, she outlines a five-step process to make our gardens authentically American, and scores of photos throughout the book illustrate each of her principles beautifully. She advises everyone to work with their own particular landscape, rather than struggling against it -- i.e., take your design cues from the natural rock outcroppings, open fields or natural forests already in place -- don't raze them in favor of formal terraces. This, Sawyers calls capturing "a sense of place."

Next, she says designers should "derive beauty from function." Working with natural materials, she believes, enhances the American landscape: using natural stones for fences and walls in New England, adobe in the Southwest, and split-rail fencing in the hills of Virginia. Sawyers advocates designing pools and spas that are integrated into the landscape design so that they "don't look like a giant Caribbean tub dropped into the garden."

Finally, she calls for the use of "humble materials," making sure that you "marry the inside to the outside," and "involve the visitor" in the garden experience. "Even on a small urban lot," says Sawyers, "garden paths can direct and encourage a visitor's experience and create a sense of journey."

At the end of the book, Sawyers writes about several residential and public gardens that capture the spirit of a true "American garden," and she demonstrates how each one includes the five principles she outlines in the book. Among them area the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas and the Brandywine Conservancy River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Sawyers is not writing about some kind of design style that's one-size fits all for American landscapes like the "New American Garden" developed by James van Sweden and Wolfgang Oehme, with wide swathes of ornamental grasses, shrubs and perennials. The "American" garden that Sawyers envisions would be different in every region of the United States, yet have singular qualities that everyone could recognize as truly "American."

If you're tired of English cottage gardens, Asian-style gardens and formal landscapes, as I often am, this is the book for you. It'll inspire you to think about how to create a landscape that's not only original, but one that will last through the American ages.