Small Garden: Design Your Garden with This Gardening Book for Beginners (Collins Gardening)

by Joe Swift

Create your own small garden with expert gardener Joe Swift.

Green spaces are the perfect antidote to fast city living. Learn how to create your own small garden with expert gardener Joe Swift's practical, easy-to-follow advice. From courtyards to rooftops, transform awkward and unexciting spaces with inspirational ideas and solutions.

Whatever you want your green space to look like and be used for, Joe's no-nonsense approach guides you through issues such as privacy, boundaries and shade, to growing plants in areas with little to no soil.

The wider environmental benefits are significant - helping to reduce pollution and minimise the heat island effect (a result of the hardscape in towns and cities). The plants will increase biodiversity, and many will be an important year-round resource for wildlife.

In this book, Joe covers a vast range of exciting, impactful and innovative ways to stamp your personality on your outdoor space.

He demonstrates how to use paving, boundaries, containers, furniture, water and sculpture to help structure and define, and how to give the starring role to the plants you choose to draw the seasons into our towns and cities.

Joe Swift is an author, TV presenter and garden designer. He makes regular appearances on BBC's Gardener's World and the RHS Flower Shows

• ISBN13: 9780008461089
• Publish Date: 3 March 2022
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Collins
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 224
• Language: English
• URL: http://collins.co.uk

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Create Your Own Small Garden is one of a set of accessible gardening guides by Joe Swift covering a range of gardening topics. Due out 3rd March 2022 from Collins Reference, it's 224 pages and will be available in ebook format.

This is a well written garden tutorial and inspiration book aimed specifically at designing and gardening effectively within the constraints of working with limited space. The author does a really good job of highlighting specific potential problem areas and providing creative solutions. The information is written in clear and concise blocks with special tips written directly on the photo illustrations.

The chapters are arranged thematically around specific design elements: surfaces, boundaries, creating privacy, storage, raised beds, container gardening, roofs and balconies, and a lot more. The second part of the book contains a good listing of plants, shrubs, trees, bulbs, and perennials for every purpose. Many of them are chosen for their limited size or suitability/toughness vs. urban or less than ideal situations. Plant listings contain the botanical (Latin) nomenclature as well as common name, a description, and colour photos showing foliage and flowers (if applicable).

The book's terminology and climate information are based on UK English, although most of the information is certainly applicable to gardeners outside the British Islands.

Five stars. This would be a good choice for public and school libraries, gardening groups, community/allotment gardens, suburban gardeners, homeowners, etc.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.