Product Description

By day, Bunny Williams is one of New York's most successful interior designers, a woman whose hours are filled with high-powered meetings, magazine photo shoots, and detailed consultations with clients. But when the week shades into Friday evening, Bunny can be found in the idyllic retreat of her Connecticut garden, the emotional center of her life and the source of perhaps her greatest creative efforts. After five days at the top of the design world, nothing means more to this warm and brilliant woman than to spend the next two with her hands in the dirt, musing about the effect of trees and flowers, paths and benches.

The passion Bunny feels for her garden is a deep one shared by countless others -- in the country, in the suburbs, and even in the city. Gardening has become America's favorite pastime, but its vocabulary remains intimidating, even to those fluent in the language of style and design. Applying the lessons we've learned about interior space to the outdoors is a good idea, but it doesn't work without help: before we can decorate the outdoor room we need to understand its character, and few people can guide us to that understanding better than Bunny Williams.

Style and sophistication are the central issues here, just as they were when The Silver Palate, Martha Stewart, and even Julia Child first convinced Americans that they could entertain and cook and decorate with panache. Gardening with style is also possible for everyone, Bunny insists, and she proceeds to show us how to think about context, the texture of foliage, and the pattern of the garden. This is not a botanical or technical manual, nor is it a dream book filled with lovely pictures and little information. Instead, Bunny has created a garden-design style book with significant practical content and an extraordinary sense of its own style -- an aesthetic how-to, as it were, with fresh, surprising, and attainable.

On Garden Style elevates our aesthetic sense, introducing both novice and experienced gardeners to new ways of thinking about style, form, ornament, and the look and feel of a garden, even as it allows us to appreciate the small details inherent in the placement of a watering can, the texture of a stone path, or the color of a hedge backing an old wooden bench. While other gardening books provide us with the basics of growing and nurturing plants or the elements of landscape design, this stunningly designed volume shows us how to fill our gardens with nuance, personality, and true style.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92627 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Best of the garden design books
When I first moved into my new house (it was my first house) I read several books on garden design that would give me some kind of orientation about what to do with my back yard. It was a mess. Ms. William's book stood out (and still does) as the book that was most helpful and inspiring at the same time. It is beautifully written and well organized, and takes you through all aspects and stages of garden design, from principle to execution. Threaded throughout the book is a philosophy of restraint that I have learned is so important for the garden or any other designer who aims at the achievement of quiet beauty in his/her environment. Ms. William's book (accompanied with the beautiful prose of Nancy Drew, writer on garden life) is certainly a must have for anyone starting out in garen design, and the photographs make the book worth having for any garden enthusiast. I was shocked to see that no one had given it a five star rating till now!

Truly the Best Book of its Kind
I own a lot of gardening books and this is one of my all time favorites. I return to it almost every season. It's rare that a book with pretty pictures delivers on the substance and this one really does. Williams gives you a great framework for how to look at your garden, offers tons of beautiful examples and gives you lots of practical tips. Plus she realy has great taste which is unique and special as opposed to generic good taste which a lot of garden tomes support. I finally visited her garden when it was open to the public and it was even better than the book! She's extremely talented.

A Strolling Diary Companion for Garden Lovers
ON GARDEN STYLE is as fine a volume on understanding the land and the particular space that surrounds our living space and how to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Not a book of exotic places rarely related to the practicalities of even the most dream-oriented gardener, this book lovingly looks at land, at space, and at the personality of the owner and outlines and demonstrates how a space of meaning and contemplation and beauty can be accessed by even the most minimal area.

Bunny Williams, Nancy Drew, and John Roselli combine their talents in sharing ideas mulled by avid devotees of the garden and then divide this fine book into chapters that address flowers and plantings, trees, gateways, sculptural additions, colors, paths, pools - all of the aspects of creating the kind of garden about which we all dream. The photography is splendid and is well accompanied by drawings (Roselli) that transform dream into reality. The running commentary and words of wisdom by Nancy Drew are close to natural poetry.

Yet despite the very artistic aspects of this volume it is in the end a resource for transforming inspiration into reality. That is a trick few writers and illustrators have achieved. This is a must own book for every serious gardener. Grady Harp, December 06