Fine Gardening Design Guides: Accent Your Garden (The Taunton Press)
Compiled by the people who make gardening look easy, this book includes instructions on making your garden a dream-come-true mini-heaven, complete with burbling fountains, rose-draped trellises and dreamy stone walkways.
This isn't a guide for the green thumb, however, as much as a playbook on how to create structures that will better display the plants that you grow. In this book, daffodils and roses play second-fiddle to brick pathways, birdhouses and pretty picket fences.
Some of America's more successful gardeners offer tips on establishing these structures accompanied by glossy photos: not only does the book offer step-by-step tips on materials needed and how to build these structures, it also offers dreamy landscapes that make a fun book to leaf through.
A rustic garden arbor, a glorious fountain, and a bust of Salvador Dali draped with foliage: these are among the sometimes gorgeous, sometimes whimsical focal points in these hard-core gardeners' personal plots.
Some of these suggestions are tough to envision carrying out; others are handy tips for those who've long thought of building a stone wall, but weren't sure how to do it.
And above all else, the book is a source of ideas for those of us who appreciate beauty, but aren't creative enough to dream up these landscapes ourselves.
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