Every day when she arrives at work, landscape architect Joni Janecki faces a daunting task: to create a piece of paradise for her clients. For this young, up-and-coming designer, that often means bucking mainstream design and gardening culture. Janecki rejects the expansive lawns and tightly clipped shrubs that have become the standards of America's created landscape. Instead, she tries to introduce the natural world to her clients by landscaping their homes, parks, and businesses with the native plants that the larger gardening culture often ignores.
Kathryn Phillips follows Janecki as she struggles against nursery fads, anxious clients, pest plants, pesky budgets, and self-doubts to design paradise. The result, in the tradition of our best science and nature journalists, is an engrossing narrative which illuminates the complex forces that shape so much of the natural world we see each day. She introduces us to plant promoters, who want to carpet the world in roses, and nursery retailers who have to adapt to ever-changing fads.
By the book's end, readers will be rooting for Janecki and seeing the created landscape around them-and its often tenuous relationship with nature-with new eyes.
