Cultivating Garden Style: Inspired Ideas and Practical Advice to Unleash Your Garden Personality

by Rochelle Greayer

Overview

“Get ready, the garden you’ve always longed for is at your fingertips. With images and ideas, Cultivating Garden Style releases your inner designer and helps you create a landscape that is yours and yours alone!” —Ivette Soler, author of The Edible Front Yard

In Cultivating Garden Style, Rochelle Greayer shares ways to create outdoor areas that are charming, comfortable, appealing, and reflect individuality. It features twenty-three unique garden styles accompanied by advice on how to recreate the look. Simple step-by-step projects, like how to make a macramé plant hanger, help the reader personalize the space. Helpful tips and tricks, including how to pick the right tree and pick the right combination of plants and containers, offer essential lessons in gardening and design. More than 1,500 dazzling color photographs give the book a visual punch.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781604694772
Publisher:	Timber Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/07/2014
Pages:	324
Sales rank:	292,398
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Rochelle Greayer is the creator of PITH + VIGOR, the co-editor of Leaf Magazine, and a weekly columnist for Apartment Therapy. A graduate of the English Gardening School in London, Greayer designs gardens internationally and earned a coveted medal from the Royal Horticultural Society at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. 

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
Making a garden should never be less than a deeply fulfilling experience. There is no need to feel overwhelmed by landscaping plans and plant choices; the task can be approached as you might undertake a kitchen update. This book will share ways to create outdoor areas that, like our interior rooms, charm our design sensibilities, are comfortable and appealing to our personal tastes, and reflect our individuality. While I hope you find endless inspiration in these pages, I will also help you understand basic design concepts, garden construction, and plants—what makes them grow and look beautiful together, and why they are important to the nature that surrounds us.

A great garden welcomes you in the same way that a wonderful hotel sweeps you away to another place. The best gardens are adventures, filled with discovery and exploration, and each chapter in this book will take you on a journey through a particular garden style. The image collages share my inspiration and are the process I use to gather ideas for a garden. I suggest you let them form the starting place for layering in the story of your own landscape. The follow-on pages will help you define the special features of your own garden and will guide you through ideas for the plants and beautiful objects that will reside there.

To create a garden that is a perfect reflection of you and whoever else lives in it, you must insert yourself into the experiment. Henry David Thoreau wrote that “it’s not what you look at, it is what you see,” and you must perceive the garden as an opportunity to transcend the ordinary. Don’t be afraid to express yourself and do whatever crazy thing you might have always thought wonderful.

They say that smell is the most powerful sense for drawing us back to a particular place and time, but I think gardens and plants have remarkable time-machine powers. Certain landscapes can take me back to when I was a kid building grasshopper graveyards with little stones in the dirt, counting the shades of green on my grandmother’s Montana ranch, or sniffing nettle (thinking it was mint), only to learn of its painful effects on my nose. These adventures that start with plants are so valuable for us as adults, and even more important to build into our children’s lives so that they mature into people who not only cherish and protect the environment, but are also happy people.

We go outside to grow things, breathe fresh air, regenerate, and relax. Trying to conquer the forces (such as storms and pests) that act against all our best garden intentions is counter to what we seek in nature. It is much wiser to recognize that you are just one part of the design and no matter what your initial vision, the final outcome will never be just as you intended. But if you learn to work as a team with the garden, you will enjoy some wonderful, unanticipated surprises.

I want a garden to live in, one that reflects my character and taste as much as the things I wear and with which I choose to fill my home. But a garden is a specific kind of challenge; it changes and has a life of its own, and that presents challenges in a way that no other design practice does. A garden has to weather, well, the weather. It has no roof or walls—though you can define them if you want—and the confines arguably don’t even stop at the property lines. Stuff lives in a garden; things move and change all on their own, and they create intricate relationships with other things around them (whether you, the garden maker, likes it or not). When you think about a garden’s ecosystem in this way, the practice of garden design starts to resemble some sort of Frankensteinian experiment in evolving beauty. Which is, of course, exactly what it is.

If I achieve one thing with this book, I hope it is to spur you to imagine something more for your garden—to discover the ways in which it can feed your desires and provide an extraordinarily satisfying place for you to live, play, and become rejuvenated.
 

What People are Saying About This

Ivette Soler

"Cultivating Garden Style releases your inner designer and helps you create a landscape that is yours and yours alone!"

Editorial Reviews

07/21/2014
Columnist and blogger Greayer offers a kaleidoscope of gardening schemes to help amateur gardeners give identity and style to their outdoor living space. Her eclectic combination of refurbishing, arts and crafts, and landscape design create new possibilities for the garden to become a living extension of home decor. For example, the section “Cultivated Collectors” re-envisions plant display with a creative cluster of bromeliads spilling from the drawers of an antique library card file. The section on the garden for “Bohemians” introduces airy ethereal plants such as tall verbena and cow parsley to lend elegance to a quirky garden scheme. Even so, it is not all about the plants. Arranging outdoor space also involves knowing the correct way to hang and best position a tire and use the right outdoor fabric on the patio furniture. The extravagant use of color photos on each page brings visual clarity to otherwise improbable schemes. Whether depicting “retro rockery,” topiary, trellising, Danish or Zen features, the book offers needed guidance for designing outdoor space in a way that helps gardeners bring unique personality to their living, growing outdoor decor. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Get ready, the garden you’ve always longed for is at your fingertips. With images and ideas, Cultivating Garden Style releases your inner designer and helps you create a landscape that is yours and yours alone!”

Ivette Soler

Rochelle Greayer has demystified garden design. Her approach of creating a garden the same way I would decorate a room is exactly what I needed to start personalizing our outdoor space!”

founder and editor of Making it Lovely Nicole Balch

Offers needed guidance for designing outdoor space in a way that helps gardeners bring unique personality to their living, growing outdoor décor.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“The big book of inspired ideas from popular columnist and blogger Rochelle Greayer guides readers through the process of transforming outdoor spaces—vast or tiny—into practical yet gorgeous reflections of your own style.” —BookPage

“It’s thorough, inspirational, and a total win. Rochelle, if you’re reading this, I’m your #1 fan girl. Wet your palate with this fun quiz, and then buy the book.” —Sunset

“Loaded with buying guides, DIY ideas, and plant suggestions for creating designs that reflect your personality and taste.” —The American Gardener

“A systematic and thorough style guide—bordering on encyclopedic—for gardens. Greayer’s book offers tips for creating a garden that reflects your personal style, suggests sources for everything from plants to outdoor furniture, and has many step-by-step DIY projects.” —Gardenista

“Loads of luscious images of gardens, products and cultural references—alongside brilliant how-tos—organized by themes with irresistible yet relatable names.” —Horticult

“Will take readers through the entire process of designing a garden.” —The Press Herald

“A creative resource for someone serious about making their open-air spaces as beautiful as their home.” —Garden & Gun

“Rochelle Greayer has demystified garden design. Her approach of creating a garden the same way I would decorate a room is exactly what I needed to start personalizing our outdoor space!” —Making it Lovely
 
“Design expert Rochelle Greayer suggests new takes on garden design in Cultivating Garden Style that put pizzazz into outdoor living.” —California Bounitful   

“Through deft use of photographs, advice, tips, infographics and quotes from the gardeners themselves, Greayer presents what might have been a complicated and overbearing endeavor. I find myself returning to this book, each time seeing something new, something I missed, something I can use in my own garden.” —Rancho Reubidoux 

“A real gem, full of inspiration and practical guidance on how to cultivate a garden that’s so divine, it will give you goosebumps.” —Sweet Spot Style

From the Publisher

"a systematic and thorough style guide— bordering on encyclopedic—for gardens. Greayer's book offers tips for creating a garden that reflects your personal style, suggests sources for everything from plants to outdoor furniture, and has many step-by-step DIY projects."

Gardenista

A creative resource for someone serious about making their open-air spaces as beautiful as their home.

Garden & Gun

"A real gem, full of inspiration and practical guidance on how to cultivate a garden that’s so divine, it will give you goosebumps.”

Sweet Spot Style

"Cultivating Garden Style releases your inner designer and helps you create a landscape that is yours and yours alone!"

author of The Edible Front Yard Ivette Soler

The big book of inspired ideas from popular columnist and blogger Rochelle Greayer guides readers through the process of transforming outdoor spaces—vast or tiny—into practical yet gorgeous reflections of your own style.” 

BookPage

Through deft use of photographs, advice, tips, infographics and quotes from the gardeners themselves, Greayer presents what might have been a complicated and overbearing endeavor. I find myself returning to this book, each time seeing something new, something I missed, something I can use in my own garden.

Rancho Reubidoux

It’s not often that you get the time to read a book cover-to-cover, much less find a book you want to read cover-to-cover, and even less, find a resourceful gardening and design book that you want to read cover-to-cover. But I did just that with Cultivating Garden Style.”

Made + Remade

January is a great time of year to field DIY ideas and Cultivating Garden Style is packed full of them.

Digging

This unique book aims to help gardeners bring their style from inside into any outside space. Laced with style guides and visual inspiration, Cultivating Garden Style covers 23 different styles, ranging from Retro Rockery, to Tropical Noir. A brilliant housewarming gift for friends who have just redesigned their new home, and want to leave their mark on the garden."

Landlove