Garden Floor: From Gravel Gardens to Camomile Lawns [Hardcover]

Nigel Colborn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2000

Most gardens have an open space at their heart ‹ a focal ³floor² amidst the beds, borders, and shrubbery that surround it. Now, this marvelous new collection of ideas and projects shows you how to transform that space into the showpiece of your garden. Featuring more than a dozen projects, The Garden Floor is superbly enhanced with color illustrations and photos of gardens from around the world.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Written by leading garden expert Nigel Colborn, The Garden Floor is a powerhouse of ideas for the adventurous gardener who wishes to transform the ground space at the heart of their plot. Whether you dream of a smart herringbone brick terrace, a Japanese-style gravel garden, a delicate thyme and chamomile lawn, or even a low-maintenance concrete terrace, this book has all the answers. A series of more than a dozen inspiring projects for new garden floors is accompanied by detailed information on the materials and tools required to do the job. Outstanding step-by-step color illustrations explain how to create the various surfaces and different effects, followed by sumptuous photos of gardens around the world. There is also complete information on how to plan and execute a basic design in your garden, as well as everything you need to know about maintaining your new garden floor once it has been completed.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 127 pages
• Publisher: Trafalgar Square Publishing (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1570761663
• ISBN-13: 978-1570761669
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 9.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #363,658 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is the one!, October 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Garden Floor: From Gravel Gardens to Camomile Lawns (Hardcover)

My bookshelves are full of gardening books with lots of beautiful photographs but little usable information - unless of course you can take 3 months off your job as a finishing carpenter, or your landscaping efforts consist of hitting the speed-dial button for your favorite Master Gardener. Otherwise, you might as well be satisfied for your landscaping to look like everyone else's. "The Garden Floor", though, offers refreshing design ideas for formal, Japanese, cottage-y, contemporary & woodsy gardens, involving a range of materials from your basic grass & concrete to scree, recycled materials, many kinds of stone & wood, brickwork, plant materials, even glass beads. For the not-so-design-oriented reader, the author covers designing your garden to look appropriate to the style of your home. The suitability and maintenance required for a vast array of materials is covered frankly, including the best information I have found in my search for lawn replacement plants. As the title says, the focus of the book is at ground level, but both the photos and the text give enough information & advice on adjacent plant materials (and alternatives) that the less experienced gardener won't feel unprepared to recreate the look in their own backyard. Instructions for the DIYer are thorough & include sketches, but thankfully don't take over the book. The end product: a book for the novice or advanced gardener, that is beautiful enough to buy for the photos and thorough enough to convince my husband I bought him a DIY book to save money!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Such a pedestrian name for such a lovely book, July 21, 2004

By 

Chocolate Dog (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Garden Floor: From Gravel Gardens to Camomile Lawns (Hardcover)

This is a simply stunning book. Not only does Colborn discuss various garden floor options, but he provides lucid, approachable philosophy of garden design. You'll find yourself looking at the many pictures not only for groundcover options, but also for ideas that make your garden sing.