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The Inward Garden: Creating a Place of Beauty and Meaning
 
 
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The Inward Garden: Creating a Place of Beauty and Meaning [Hardcover]

Messervy (Author), Sam Abell (Photographer)
4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)


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Hardcover $25.73  
Hardcover, March 20, 1995 --  

Book Description

March 20, 1995
The author, a landscape design consultant, explains garden design principles, with an emphasis on contemplative gardens. This book guides the user to designing an area with the eye of an architect, incorporating individual, emotional, psychological and spiritual factors.


Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Julie Moir Messervy is an award-winning author and hugely successful garden designer. Her work includes a three-acre Music Garden in Toronto designed in collaboration with Yo Yo Ma. Sam Abell is photographer-in-residence for National Geographic magazine. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Little, Brown; 1st edition (March 20, 1995)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0316567922
  • ISBN-13: 978-0316567923
  • Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 10.1 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #409,509 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

With thirty years of experience, five books and numerous high-profile lectures, Julie Moir Messervy has emerged as a leader of a movement in which landscape design is as much a personal journey as it is leaving a unique imprint upon the earth. She has inspired a new generation of homeowners, landscape designers and others to create personal gardens that reflect an inward vision deeply rooted in outdoor archetypes, childhood imagination and aesthetic impulses.

Messervy's first book, Contemplative Gardens (Howell Press, 1990), was named "one of the ten best garden books of the year" by The New York Times. Her second book, The Inward Garden (Little, Brown and Company, 1995), won the Garden Writers Association of America Gold Medal in 1996. Her third book, The Magic Land, was proclaimed a "delight" by Yo-Yo Ma and "a companion for inspired daydreaming" by The Boston Globe. Messervy's fourth book, written in partnership with architect Sarah Susanka, Outside the Not So Big House, (The Taunton Press, 2006) was a consistent best seller on Amazon.com and ranked at the top of bookseller lists in Canada. Julie Messervy's newest book, Home Outside: Creating the Landscape you Love (The Taunton Press, 2009), is now available for purchase at Amazon.com.

Julie Moir Messervy also maintains a Blog and Website for JMMDS, the award-winning landscape design studio of which she is the principal designer. JMMDS is located in Saxtons River, VT.
http://blog.jmmds.com/
http://jmmds.com/

Full schedule of upcoming lectures and workshops:
http://blog.jmmds.com/category/events/

 

Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
5 star:
 (7)
4 star:    (0)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
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Average Customer Review
4.6 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

65 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Putting Foundations Under your Dream Garden, July 17, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: The Inward Garden: Creating a Place of Beauty and Meaning (Hardcover)
Messervy has found a way to codify something that seemed vague to me: the "feel" of a landscape, or how a person reacts to a space. She breaks landscape forms down into 7 "archetypes," lists the features of each, then suggests ways to use this new understanding in designing your own yard or garden. I suddenly realized, for example, that the narrow, paved alleys coming off my tiny city backyard weren't necessarily the problem and disappointment I had always considered them, but were features I could play up and turn to advantage. (They had always tempted me to walk to the end -- now I just have to make that journey worthwhile.) I was just bursting with ideas after reading this book, able to look at my tiny space with new eyes. The archetypal business isn't just pleasantly mystical but is also practical, backed up with sophisticated but down-to-earth ideas. It's a different kind of garden design book that gets you to think of the overall "f! eel" (not look) you want first (the step missing from most gardening books), and then figure out how to actually construct it -- a satisfying blend of mythic/artistic with practical and well-organized. (And as a bonus, the photos are drop-dead gorgeous!)
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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Learn a new way to think about designing your garden, November 18, 1997
By A Customer
This review is from: The Inward Garden: Creating a Place of Beauty and Meaning (Hardcover)
This is garden design from the heart, not the head. Garden design books usually offer us a formula, templates, and lists of plants. "The Inward Garden" instead tries to stimulate a new way of thinking about our landscapes. Messervy tries to create gardens that resonate with fond memories of the places where we felt most secure and most free as children. You might think that you want an elaborate perennial border, but after reading this book realize that you'd really rather gaze at a little bit of prairie, or a woodland or listen to a tinkling stream. If you are going to spend all that time, money and effort, wouldn't it be wonderful to have a garden that makes you feel good, instead of one that merely consumes resources and becomes a millstone? This is not the book that will help you calculate how many bags of mulch you need, or how to build a retaining wall. What it will do is help you identify what you really want from your landscape, instead of what you think you're supposed to want, or what all your neighbors have.
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The One Book That Belongs In Any Gardener's Library, July 5, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: The Inward Garden: Creating a Place of Beauty and Meaning (Hardcover)
Julie Moir Messervy has written what undoubtedly will become a classic of garden writing and design. Deeply literate and beautifully written, The Inward Garden gives the reader a process for designing one's "dream garden". Based on garden archtypes: the sea, the cave, the harbor, the promitory, the island, the mountain, and the sky, this book provides a structure for imagining the garden of one's desires and a practical process for designing this deeply felt garden. The author describes in detail each of these archytical gardens. Each archtype is illustrated with outstanding garden photographs. The Inner Garden gently asks the reader to think and feel deeply about the garden of his or her dreams and to have the couage to begin creating that garden.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
I WILL NEVER FORGET my feelings the day I started building my first garden-a half-acre Japanese-style landscape for a client' summer home high on a bluff overlooking the ocean. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
stroll journey, inward garden, outward site, daydreaming places, outward garden, archetypal places, backyard landscape, garden master, mind journey, flowery mead, garden space, cosmic tree, perennial border
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New England, Lake Como, Fletcher Steele, New Hampshire, New York, Gertrude Jekyll, Knightshayes Court, Villa Melzi, Kokoro Pond, Leo Tolstoy, Northeast Harbor, Professor Kinsaku Nakane, Professor Nakane, Thomas Jefferson
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