Customer Reviews

Garden Floor: From Gravel Gardens to Camomile Lawns

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.