An insider's guide to the world's greatest 'secret' gardens, green spaces, and pocket parks tucked away in cities around the globe Cities everywhere are graced with charming but little-known, off-the-beaten-track gardens and green spaces, offering urbanites in the know a chance to immerse themselves in nature. These often small, well-kept secrets are not as grand as those on the tourist trail but are equally delightful and rewarding to visit, if you know where to find them. Green Escapes is the revelatory insider's guide to these secret gems. Each of them open to the public, the gardens range from pocket parks, courtyards, and rooftop terraces, to community gardens and more.
This extensively revised and expanded edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban gardeners. The text's message is that working with nature, not against it, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens.
For Rebecca Bushnell, English gardening books tell a fascinating tale of the human love for plants and our will to make them do as we wish. These books powerfully evoke the desires of gardeners: they show us gardeners who, like poets, imagine not just what is but what should be. In particular, the earliest English garden books, such as Thomas Hill's The Gardeners Labyrinth or Hugh Platt's Floraes Paradise, mix magical practices with mundane recipes even when the authors insist that they rely completely on their own experience in these matters. Like early modern "books of secrets," early gardening manuals often promise the reader power to alter the essential properties of plants: to make the gillyflower double, to change the lily's hue, or to grow a cherry without a stone. Green Desire describes the innovative design of the old manuals, examining how writers and printers marketed them as fiction as well as practical advice for aspiring gardeners. Along with this attention to the delights of reading, it analyzes the strange dignity and pleasure of garden labor and the division of men's and women's roles in creating garden art. The book ends by recounting the heated debate over how much people could do to create marvels in their own gardens. For writers and readers alike, these green desires inspired dreams of power and self-improvement, fantasies of beauty achieved without work, and hopes for order in an unpredictable world--not so different from the dreams of gardeners today.
Green Roofs and Rooftop Gardens A detailed look at why and how urban rooftops are going green Living roofs cool the air, reduce water pollution, extend roof life, and cut energy costs. They also provide green space for city dwellers and habitat for birds and insects. Long popular in Europe, this building technique is now catching on in the U.S., most recently in New York City. Green Roofs and Rooftop Gardens tells the stories behind some of the city's most interesting living roofs and explains how such roofs are constructed, planted, and cared for. What's Inside Profiles of a wide range of NYC green roofs, including a rooftop farm in Queens, a high school classroom in the Bronx, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Visitor Center A history of how the technique evolved A detailed primer on construction methods Information on selecting, establishing, and caring for the special best-suited for living roofs Practical advice for creating a rooftop container garden or bringing a green roof to your school Book jacket.
Monograph on Raymond Jungles, a contemporary landscape architect based in Miami known for innovative but timeless design and a commitment to ethical stewardship of the land. For almost 40 years, Raymond Jungles has generated design solutions that respond to surrounding natural systems while restoring nature's balance and harmony on a micro-scale. His completed gardens personify timelessness and beauty, with verdant spaces that entice participation and soothe the psyche. This monograph, the fourth to focus on his work, will present 21 completed projects, along with a section of work in progress featuring sketches, renderings, and site plans of 12 current projects of varying typologies including an 18-acre Phipps Ocean Park in the Town of Palm Beach, Florida. Among the featured works are major landscapes surrounding luxury residential complexes as well as lush private gardens from the mountains in Mexico to volcanic craters in Panama, Caribbean beachfronts, the Florida Keys, and densely populated cities like Manhattan and Miami. Highlights include the restoration of the famed interior garden by the revered landscape architect Dan Kiley at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in New York; a landscape to evoke the work of legendary Brazilian designer Roberto Burle Marx at the New York Botanical Garden, and two new gardens at the the Naples Botanical Garden. Founded in 1985 by Raymond Jungles, the firm’s design priorities are generated by the scale and functionality of a space. Simple, clean, and well-detailed hardscape elements are the quintessential bones of a garden. Planting volumes vary and bold colors and textures are used with intent. The firm is guided by Raymond’s personal and design principles: integrity, relevance, and nature’s honor. Their informed designs tread lightly on the land, provide habitat, and incorporate elements of surprise.
The Tao of Vegetable Gardening explores the practical methods as well as the deeper essence of gardening. In her latest book, groundbreaking garden writer Carol Deppe (The Resilient Gardener, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties) focuses on some of the most popular home garden vegetables--tomatoes, green beans, peas, and leafy greens--and through them illustrates the key principles and practices that gardeners need to know to successfully plant and grow just about any food crop. Deppe's work has long been inspired and informed by the philosophy and wisdom of Tao Te Ching, the 2,500-year-old work attributed to Chinese sage Lao Tzu and the most translated book in the world after the Bible. The Tao of Vegetable Gardening is organized into chapters that echo fundamental Taoist concepts: Balance, Flexibility, Honoring the Essential Nature (your own and that of your plants), Effortless Effort, Non-Doing, and even Non-Knowing. Yet the book also offers a wealth of specific and valuable garden advice on topics as diverse as: - The Eat-All Greens Garden, a labor- and space-efficient way to provide all the greens a family can eat, freeze, and dry--all on a tiny piece of land suitable for small-scale and urban gardeners. - The growing problem of late blight and the future of heirloom tomatoes--and what gardeners can do to avoid problems, and even create new resistant varieties. - Establishing a Do-It-Yourself Seed Bank, including information on preparing seeds for long-term storage and how to "dehybridize" hybrids. - Twenty-four good places to not plant a tree, and thirty-seven good reasons for not planting various vegetables. Designed for gardeners of all levels, from beginners to experienced growers, The Tao of Vegetable Gardening provides a unique frame of reference: a window to the world of nature, in the garden and in ourselves.
Johnson and Te Salle deliver a meditative, beautifully illustrated yet profoundly practical book that takes readers deep into the natural world and into a new understanding of the art of gardening.
