Cuttings from My Garden Notebooks brings his art and his life together in a treasure trove of sixty-three essays revealing the complete Graham Thomas. Here, he sorts out the rhododendrons, the roses and the jasmines. He tells us about the uses of pergolas, water and troughs made of tufa for alpine plants. He reminisces about the nurserymen and the famous gardeners he has known. He suggests design solutions for unusual spaces, and ideas for gardens he has made, or only dreamed about. Written with humor, common sense and a poet's grasp of the English language, it offers encouragement and guidance for those who are just beginning to garden, and a wealth of information for experienced gardeners.

Cuttings from My Garden Notebooks

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

THOMAS, GRAHAM STUART

Gardening & Landscape Design

Sagapress

Briefly recounts the life and career of the American landscape architect, and shows her innovative designs for California gardens

Landscaping the American Dream: The Gardens and Film Sets of Florence Yoch : 1890-1972

History

Yoch, James J.

Americas

For 60 years Steele practiced landscape architecture as a fine art, designing nearly 700 gardens that form an important link between 19th-century Beaux Arts formalism and modern landscape design.

Fletcher Steele, Landscape Architect: An Account of the Gardenmakers Life, 1885-1971

Karson, Robin S.

Innisfree is a unique garden in which the techniques of Oriental design are disguised as an enchanted natural landscape. Open to the public yet hardly advertised, it is a secret garden everyone may share. Set in 200 acres in Millbrook, New York, some 90 miles from New York City, Innisfree was the private preserve of Walter and Marion Beck from 1929 to 1960. It was then bequeathed to The Innisfree Foundation, under the trusteeship of landscape architect Lester Collins. Inspired by the scroll paintings of eighth-century Chinese poet-painter Wang Wei's garden, Beck created a series of self-contained landscapes using natural elements to frame and fill exquisite pictures. Collins followed the practical directives of the Sensai Hisho, or Secret Garden Book, an ancient Japanese handbook, to transform these individual gardens into a stroll that allows the visitor to move seamlessly from one scene to the next. By the time he died in 1993, he had doubled the size of an already vast and elaborate private garden, needing 20 full-time gardeners, while converting it into a public garden that is maintained by a staff of five. In this volume, beautifully illustrated with his own photographs and others specially commissioned for it, Collins reveals the magic of Innisfree, from its underlying Eastern philosophy of landscape art to construction details that cause subtle variations in the sound of water. He describes how water sculptures are powered by gravity to combine Chinese art with 20th-century technology and how the rocks and natural features of the whole environment are used to create beauty. An art form, normally seen only in stylized images of pagodas and dragons, is reinterpreted here in a natural landscape in which maintenance has been reduced without compromise to esthetics. Built with the wisdom and principles of the East, Innisfree remains a completely American garden.

Innisfree: An American Garden

Collins, Lester

Arts & Photography

The Muses of Gwinn tells the story of how this work of art was created, and still today reflects the style and economics of the United States during the early twentieth century. With its formal gardens, lawns, fountains, and pavilions on the shores of Lake Erie, Gwinn, originally the home of Cleveland industrialist William Mather, is one of the best preserved estates of the Country Place Era in America - a period from the turn of the century to the beginning of World War II. The exceptional quality of Gwinn's architecture and landscape reflect the hands of three of the period's most successful designers: Charles A. Platt, who combined his talents as artist, architect, and landscape architect to adapt the Italian villa to an American setting; Warren H. Manning, a leading plantsman and planner who began his career as an apprentice to Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.; and Ellen Biddle Shipman, who raised the art of garden design to extraordinary new heights - not unlike her British counterpart, Gertrude Jekyll. These were the muses of Gwinn. A near-complete set of correspondence, plant lists, and historical photographs chronicle the estate's development over more than two decades. Working from this previously unpublished archive, the author, Robin Karson, presents a richly detailed account in which the tension between formal and informal design principles, central to the estate's creation, are used to illustrate the larger picture of emerging styles in American landscape design. Her exploration of Gwinn in its social, artistic, and historic contexts adds immeasurably to American garden literature.

The Muses of Gwinn: Art and Nature in a Garden Designed by Warren H. Manning, Charles A. Platt & Ellen Biddle Shipman

This study describes the life of a woman who contributed much to the development of landscape design in America between 1914 and 1965. Ellen Biddle Shipman (1869- 1950) designed over 650 gardens and her commissions spanned the USA, from Long Island's Gold Coast to the state of Washington. Her clients included Fords, Astors and du Ponts. Her biographer examines Shipman's unusual life, including a childhood on the American frontier, years in the artists' colony of Cornish, New Hampshire, and her long association with Charles Platt. Shipman was an active advocate for women in her profession, and trained many successful designers in her all-woman practice. The book carries an introduction by Leslie Rose Close which sets out to trace women's involvement in gardening and landscape architecture, from the arrival of the earliest immigrants to the present day. An afterword by John Franklin Miller describes his restoration of Shipman's exquisite garden at Stan Hywet in Akron, Ohio.

The Gardens of Ellen Biddle Shipman

Tankard, Judith B.

Once Upon a Windowsill: A History of Indoor Plants

We have grown so accustomed to sharing our houses with plants that it may be surprising to learn that it was only in the last century that plants began to move indoors. The story of how this came to pass is an engrossing and complex one, involving many separate strands: the horticultural explosion of the Victorian period, stimulated by the plant hunters of the golden age, changing styles of architecture, new techniques of heating and lighting, the cultural values implicit in home design and decoration, and the changing role of women. Tovah Martin weaves these strands together in a chronological account of the introduction of houseplants in America, starting with the first bulbs brought indoors for forcing, through the successive introductions of ever more exotic plant materials, including the proliferation of ferns. It is a story equally rich in plant lore and insights into American culture. Once Upon a Windowsill is one of those books that manage, through a perceptiv

Once upon a Windowsill: A History of Indoor Plants

MARTIN, TOVAH

An exposition of every aspect of the subject, from the underlying geology of rocks and history of the art of rock gardening to the practical matters of creating a rock garden. The color illustrations include some of the author's own watercolors.

Rock Garden and Its Plants: From Grotto to Alpine House

Perhaps the best known &amp; most influential of Thomas's many books, this examination of more than 2,000 perennials combines his erudition &amp; his gift for vivid descriptions &amp; graceful phrases.

Perennial Garden Plants: Or the Modern Florilegium : A Concise Account of Herbaceous Plants, Including Bulbs, for General Garden Use

The third edition (1st ed. was 1970) of a standard reference/handbook. Thomas (gardens consultant, the National Trust) treats perennials and grasses, climbers, and shrubs suitable as ground covers, with consideration of selected conifers and ferns. Thomas is not only world famous, but he loves his work, and the love shows. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Plants for Ground-Cover

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