19. Summer Reading
Garden Bookworm.
Until now, most of my landscape design education has been on-line. Here is my first foray into building my landscape design library.
I recently acquired three books for some light summer reading while I was on holiday:
Northwest Home Landscaping: 48 Landscape Designs
Residential Landscape Architecture: Design Process for the Private Residence, and
Constructing Landscape: Materials, Techniques, Structural Components
I took the first two with me on my summer holiday. The third one I had to leave at home, it weighs about six pounds!
A bonus book that I found, and loved, earlier this year is a book about Piet Oudolf’s work:
Planting the Natural Garden
Residential Landscape Architecture, Design Process for the Private Residence
This is my favorite book on landscape design, so far. This is similar in tone to the Ching book series and Architectural Graphics Standards, which are my go-to’s as an architect. This book provided good high level insights into design considerations and basics of the landscape design process with a client.
Northwest Home Landscaping
I liked this book for providing regional plant suggestions and detailed plan drawings combined with hand-drawn renderings. There is also a small photo catalog of plants.
Constructing Landscape: Materials, Techniques, Structural Components
This book is very detailed with European specifications (metric). It maybe more technical, but I think this book will end up being a good resource. Especially for a DIY gardener, it is nice to have a source book with a wide array of detail conditions that I can then modify to fit my garden (and budget).
Planting the Natural Garden
I love Piet Oudolf’s work — beautiful, natural meadow compositions. His work is like art. This book has a good inventory of plants and pictures. My favorite part of the book are the select sample gardens. It is so interesting to see his hand-drawn documentation for the garden designs.
My next step is to keep reading and to look for more source material. I wish there was a book that combined landscape plans with timelapse photography — with big pictures — of the installed plants from different seasons and different ages of the garden.