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Plant Life By Valerie Easton
Settling InA few good books are just right for the season
UNLIKE FASHION designers who push, push, push into future seasons, publishers are right on schedule with new books devoted to prolonging autumn gardens. Other new offerings nudge us to look beyond our own backyards to appreciate contemporary French gardens, as well as the madly creative world of global garden design. "Late Summer Flowers" by Marina Christopher (Timber Press, $29.95). Since September and October are often the most pleasant months of the year around Puget Sound country, why not design gardens that peak later rather than during damp, chilly May and June? But how often gardens look dusty and dull by the end of August. This book, written by a British plant explorer and nurserywoman, celebrates perennials that blossom as the days shorten. Christopher explores a great many plants besides the usual mums and asters. Examining everything from sneezeweed (Helenium ssp.) to airy Gillenia trifoliate, this book opens our eyes to the possibilities of a bounteous garden all the way to Thanksgiving. "Seedheads In the Garden" by Noël Kingsbury (Timber Press, $29.95). Kingsbury teaches us to leave plants alone after their bloom is over, for our own sakes as well as for the birds. This beautifully photographed book showcases the unusual textures and striking silhouettes of plants past their prime. So don't be too quick to cut back yarrow, bear's breeches or crocosmia. When left alone to go to seed, their pearly, dried and prickly seedheads rival the grasses we've come to rely on for autumn interest. You expect the dying days of hydrangeas and sedum to be ornamental, but Kingsbury urges us to consider unexpected contributors to the autumn scene like astilbes, bee balm and Russian sage. If you aren't interested in the botany of seedheads, you'll find plenty of design ideas to keep you reading. And if the brown, skeletal look isn't your favorite for the garden, you can wait til the sparkly frost gilds the garden. Or perhaps help nature along like the "hortisculpturalists" (I'd call them illusionists) shown happily spray-painting the garden, drenching dead verbascum in shades of mustard and hot orange. "The French Country Garden: New Growth on Old Roots" by Louisa Jones (Thames & Hudson, $19.99 paperback). For the first time in a long time I put aside a novel to devour a gardening book. This one is drop-dead gorgeous, yet packed with practical information on garden construction, design and plant choices. If you can get past the romance of these engaging gardens with their spreading, old trees and mellow stone walls, you'll find most are surprisingly modern in spirit and often in scope. Jones profiles 18 gardens from Provence to the Pyrenees, grouped by themes such as formality, ecology and country-style intimacy. Of the last, she proclaims, "Grandmotherly gardens are currently very fashionable in France. My favorite garden is an extravagantly decorated wonderland on a Paris rooftop belonging to an avant-garde fashion designer." And I love the book's dedication: "For all the young people in France today who have made gardening a way of life and a hope for the future." Now, doesn't that entice you to book a flight immediately? "In Search of Paradise: Great Gardens of the World" by Penelope Hobhouse (Chicago Botanic Garden and Frances Lincoln Ltd., $45). There's nothing modest about the scope of the gardens featured in this new slab of a catalog put together for an exhibition in Chicago this fall. The British garden matriarch Hobhouse does justice to the work of the best garden photographers in the world. The elaborately photographed tome features gardens as art, architecture, history, romance, longing and, in the final chapters, the future. Our corner of the country was skipped over, and even the East Coast gets short shrift. But the book more than makes up for the slights with such a grand international vision of gardens that it will make your head spin. From a strange purple glass garden in (where else?) Los Angeles to the other-worldly Brazilian landscapes of Roberto Burle Marx, you can't help but be seduced by this global vision of contemporary garden design. Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.
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