Product Description

What makes a garden authentic? For American gardeners, this question can be vexing. Because America is a comparatively young nation, it hasn't had much time to develop an indigenous garden style. Gardeners have tended to turn to other national traditions—such as Italy's, Japan's, or England's—for inspiration. The unhappy result of this piecemeal stylistic borrowing has been the creation of gardens that bear no relationship to local landscapes and history, and that have no connection with our daily lives.

Clair Sawyers shows this tendency can be reversed: how we can create gardens that are both deeply rooted in their surroundings and deeply satisfying to their creators and owners. Drawing on her knowledge of a vast array of American and foreign gardens, she identifies five principles that help instill a sense of authenticity: capture the sense of place, derive beauty from function, use humble or indigenous materials, marry the inside to the outside, and involve the visitor.

Practical and inspiring, The Authentic Garden will enable the reader to make a garden that is true to a specific time, place, and culture; to capture and reflect an authentic spirit so that the garden, in turn, will nurture the spirit of those who cherish and dwell in it.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #478035 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 285 pages

From Booklist
English cottage borders, Japanese serenity havens, classic Italian vistas: all have been primary sources of inspiration for America's public and private gardens, yet there is no need for homegrown gardeners to look to foreign lands for guidance. To do so is, in Sawyers' view, inauthentic, and she offers a series of core propositions designed to aid gardeners in creating outdoor spaces that are faithful to their native surroundings and embody horticultural reflections of American culture. From evaluating available spaces to incorporating functional elements to utilizing modest materials, adhering to Sawyers' well-considered ground rules will encourage home owners to coordinate indoor and outdoor areas while simultaneously enabling visitors to feel more than a casual sense of attachment to the landscape. Helpfully demonstrating the reality behind such lofty concepts through in-depth analysis of quintessential American public gardens, such as the Lady Bird Johnson Wildlife Center in Austin, Texas, and noteworthy private gardens from Pennsylvania to Arizona, Sawyers offers a stimulating landscape study. Haggas, Carol

Review
"If you consider yourself a conscientious consumer, one who tries to tread lightly on the earth, then the ideas Claire Sawyers presents in her elegantly written book, The Authentic Garden, will resonate with you."The American Gardener (American Gardener )

"If you consider yourself a conscientious consumer, one who tries to tread lightly on the earth, then the ideas Claire Sawyers presents in her elegantly written book, The Authentic Garden, will resonate with you."The American Gardener (American Gardener )

Review

“Ms. Sawyers thinks that admirers are drawn to certain traits, moods or emotions in other cultures’ gardens. And, she adds, they don’t dissect those underlying characteristics adequately. For example, gardeners may be drawn to a Japanese lantern. But the quality to translate into a personal garden is tranquility, rather than the specific object itself.”

The Bulletin

“Sawyers shows how we can create gardens that are both deeply rooted in their surroundings and deeply satisfying to their creators and owners.” - Sierra Heritage Magazine

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Customer Reviews

A great design book for landscape architecture students and seasoned design professionals!
As the director of the Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College, Claire Sawyers generalized her many years of international and domestic landscape design experience and her extensive horticultural knowledge in "The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating A Sense of Place."

What are authentic gardens? They are "gardens that are both deeply rooted in their surroundings and deeply satisfying to their creators and owners." They are gardens that are "true to a specific time, place and culture."

Claire Sawyers described five principles to create authentic gardens: capture the sense of place (or "Genius Loci," a popular term to landscape architecture students and designers), derive beauty from function ("form follows function"), use humble or indigenous materials (sustainable and local materials), marry the inside to the outside (treat a building and its garden as different parts of the same overall design), and involve the visitor (user participation). These are timeless, universal principles that are common to architecture, landscape architecture and urban design and planning. Claire Sawyers also used the fine works by some famous designers like Edith Roberts, Elsa Rehmann, Frank Lloyd Wright to demonstrate how these principles can be used in garden design.

"The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating A Sense of Place" has 288 pages and many fine interior color photographs. It is a great design book for landscape architecture students and seasoned design professionals!

Gang Chen, Author of "LEED AP Exam Guide" & "Planting Design Illustrated." LEED AP, AIA

So That's Why I Love the Gardens I Do
This is a wonderful book, and an important one, I think. It explains why some gardens touch us and how that sense of wonder is achieved in compelling gardens and maybe even in our own. It does not tell us what plants to plant or how deep to dig or what amendments to add to our soil. For me, it was a light bulb going on. Oh, so that's why I loved this or that on a garden visit! So that's why one thing or another seemed out of place or discordant. As the author describes and illustrates her five principles, it becomes clear what belongs in a garden and what doesn't and why it doesn't. She explains something about regional differences and indigenous materials and why some things just seem to fit in certain places. An additional bonus for me was that, as a resident of southeastern Pennsylvania, several of the public gardens and aboretums she uses as examples are familiar to me and allowed me to look beyond the photographs and into my own memory of the places she describes. The photos are, I should add, extremely well chosen and well placed within the text to illustrate her points. I have to admit that I borrowed this book from the library, but now I know I need to have it for my own.

Good, but a bit disappointing
This is a nice book. The five "principles" are smart and sensible (if not brilliantly original), the photos are apt and attractive and the writing is clear (if humorless). But in illustrating each of her principles the author resorts to the approach taken by so many other gardening books -- an interesting driveway here, a creative clothesline there. And the tone is often annoyingly cranky, picking on current whipping boys like green meatballs and chain-store-bought marigolds. And one could nitpick. The author counsels the use of natives two pages after a lovely photograph of the Scott Arboretum (of which she's the director) that features an interesting assemblage of phormiums, elephant ears and other exotics. In one of her examples of using humble materials - the pebble garden at Dumbarton Oaks - she notes that that great estate was designed by Beatrix Farrand but fails to mention that Farrand didn't design the pebble garden and probably hated it. And dwelling on the two Taliesins and Fallingwater to explain how to figure out the "genius loci" of the reader's half acre suburban plot just isn't helpful. The book just doesn't seem to me to merit all those "five star" reviews. It certainly won't change my gardening life the way, say, Julie Moir Messervy's "The Inward Garden" did.