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Garden Wonderland: Create Life-Changing Outdoor Spaces for Beauty, Harvest, Meaning, and Joy
A visual feast of garden design inspiration that embraces diversity and teaches you how to create a lush, colorful, edible, and meaningful garden wonderland of your own.
Award-winning garden designer Leslie Bennett creates gardens filled with stunning layers of color and texture. But even more than that, they "feed the eye and nourish the soul" ( Elle Decor ).
Featuring practical how-to information alongside examples from nineteen gardens, Bennett shows how to incorporate personal and edible elements into the landscape to honor a variety of cultures, while including families of all shapes and sizes, to create space that nurtures self, community, and more. For example, the team designed a garden for the cofounder of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation to showcase art from emerging Black artists, while for a vegan chef's garden, they incorporated unusual vegetables that can't be found in grocery stores. A garden for a daughter of diplomats reflects the many places she's lived around the world; for a family that wants to beautify their neighborhood, they designed a vibrant community-oriented front yard.
With chapters on floral, edible, gathering, healing, and cultural wonderlands, Bennett provides advice for tailoring a garden to your own needs, whether it's a place to host elegant garden parties, for children to play, to grow your own food and creativity, or a sanctuary to rest and relax. In Garden Wonderland , Bennett helps you unlock the potential of your garden to become a space of inspiring natural beauty, abundance, connection, and belonging.
Award-winning garden designer Leslie Bennett creates gardens filled with stunning layers of color and texture. But even more than that, they "feed the eye and nourish the soul" ( Elle Decor ).
Featuring practical how-to information alongside examples from nineteen gardens, Bennett shows how to incorporate personal and edible elements into the landscape to honor a variety of cultures, while including families of all shapes and sizes, to create space that nurtures self, community, and more. For example, the team designed a garden for the cofounder of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation to showcase art from emerging Black artists, while for a vegan chef's garden, they incorporated unusual vegetables that can't be found in grocery stores. A garden for a daughter of diplomats reflects the many places she's lived around the world; for a family that wants to beautify their neighborhood, they designed a vibrant community-oriented front yard.
With chapters on floral, edible, gathering, healing, and cultural wonderlands, Bennett provides advice for tailoring a garden to your own needs, whether it's a place to host elegant garden parties, for children to play, to grow your own food and creativity, or a sanctuary to rest and relax. In Garden Wonderland , Bennett helps you unlock the potential of your garden to become a space of inspiring natural beauty, abundance, connection, and belonging.
- GenresGardeningNonfiction
272 pages, Hardcover
Published April 2, 2024
About the author
Leslie Bennett
6 books5 followersLeslie Bennett and Stefani Bittner are co-founders of Star Apple Edible + Fine Gardening, a San Francisco Bay Area landscape design firm focusing on aesthetic edible gardening. At Star Apple, they bring together ecologically sound landscape principles and small-scale urban agriculture, working with both ornamental and edible plants to create integrated landscapes. Visit www.StarAppleEdibleGardens.com.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 29, 2024
Honestly it’s a 5⭐️ book (if you live in the southwest states), the pictures, ideas and information are all amazing! I gave it 3.5 stars for my own reference.
I don’t mean this in a bad way but it is a bit of a upper class garden book…these are all very lovely upper class homes and yards…and the gardens are all California based. While I did grab a couple ideas and gained motivation on a few possible yard glam ups, I could not get too excited about the plantings as most of them will not grow where I live. Absolutely worth a read, and gazing over all of the amazing pictures, wherever you live.
I don’t mean this in a bad way but it is a bit of a upper class garden book…these are all very lovely upper class homes and yards…and the gardens are all California based. While I did grab a couple ideas and gained motivation on a few possible yard glam ups, I could not get too excited about the plantings as most of them will not grow where I live. Absolutely worth a read, and gazing over all of the amazing pictures, wherever you live.
Displaying 1 of 1 review