Elements of Garden Design

I'm a very visual kind of gal. I just love leafing through all the gardening books with beautiful pictures with tons of eye candy, and Pinterest as a means of collecting and organizing my ideas is just one of my favorite things EVER!

And yet, of all the books I read as I stumbled stepped into this massive gardening endeavor, my favorite has been one with only a handful of black and white sketches interspersed among a collection of engaging essays.

Elements of Garden Design is so very helpful, providing a structured way of pondering, planning, and implementing the ideas from those inspiring images.

Elements of Garden Design does what few gardening books do--it addresses the process of conceiving a whole garden, as opposed to a single element like color or a particular class of plant. Joe Eck explores the idea of a garden, and offers a practical approach to translating concepts such as "intention" and "harmony" into the solid forms of hedges and terraces, paths and rooms. Novice and experienced professional alike will find both food for thought and down-on-the-ground advice on such matters as creating child- and pet-friendly designs. 

Even though I didn't have this book from the outset of the planning process, I think the chapters in the first section of the book (Part I - Theory) will give me the necessary framework for organizing my thoughts as I attempt to record what happened in the months prior to this blog's inception (before it all escapes from my brain entirely).

They are as follows:

Intention
Site
Frame
Style
Structure
Rooms
Access
Harmony
Contrast
Scale
Symmetry
Shape
Repose
Time

Some of the elements further down on the list are still in the theoretical and experimental stages, but the first few are foundational and I believe will prove most helpful in beginning my history of the garden spaces. I hope, too, that sharing in this structured way will be helpful to others as they plan and ponder their own garden!