Garden Wonderland: Create Life-Changing Outdoor Spaces for Beauty, Harvest, Meaning, and Joy

by Leslie Bennett, Julie Chai

A visual feast of garden design inspiration that embraces diversity and teaches you how to create a lush, colorful, edible, and meaningful garden wonderland of your own.

Award-winning garden designer Leslie Bennett creates gardens filled with stunning layers of color and texture. But even more than that, they "feed the eye and nourish the soul" ( Elle Decor ).

Featuring practical how-to information alongside examples from nineteen gardens, Bennett shows how to incorporate personal and edible elements into the landscape to honor a variety of cultures, while including families of all shapes and sizes, to create space that nurtures self, community, and more. For example, the team designed a garden for the cofounder of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation to showcase art from emerging Black artists, while for a vegan chef's garden, they incorporated unusual vegetables that can't be found in grocery stores. A garden for a daughter of diplomats reflects the many places she's lived around the world; for a family that wants to beautify their neighborhood, they designed a vibrant community-oriented front yard.

With chapters on floral, edible, gathering, healing, and cultural wonderlands, Bennett provides advice for tailoring a garden to your own needs, whether it's a place to host elegant garden parties, for children to play, to grow your own food and creativity, or a sanctuary to rest and relax. In Garden Wonderland , Bennett helps you unlock the potential of your garden to become a space of inspiring natural beauty, abundance, connection, and belonging.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

Published April 2, 2024

About the author

Leslie Bennett and Stefani Bittner are co-founders of Star Apple Edible + Fine Gardening, a San Francisco Bay Area landscape design firm focusing on aesthetic edible gardening. At Star Apple, they bring together ecologically sound landscape principles and small-scale urban agriculture, working with both ornamental and edible plants to create integrated landscapes. Visit www.StarAppleEdibleGardens.com.

Reviews

[Ambur Taft · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly it’s a 5⭐️ book (if you live in the southwest states), the pictures, ideas and information are all amazing! I gave it 3.5 stars for my own reference.
I don’t mean this in a bad way but it is a bit of a upper class garden book…these are all very lovely upper class homes and yards…and the gardens are all California based. While I did grab a couple ideas and gained motivation on a few possible yard glam ups, I could not get too excited about the plantings as most of them will not grow where I live. Absolutely worth a read, and gazing over all of the amazing pictures, wherever you live.

[Kalisha Grimsman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. It is visually gorgeous and lovely to look at! I bought it knowing that the gardens were all Northern California based, so it's not as significant for me in terms of using it to consider plants in my area. However, many of the principles are relevant and helpful. The book also highlighted the landscape design work done in many clients' homes, which was interesting and quite varied in style. In many of those stories the narrative was prioritized, with some garden principles loosely tied in. So it wasn't quite as informative (but I knew that going in, so I wasn't disappointed). I wish someone would make a book like this focused on my climate! That would be a dream come true. I loved looking at it, gleaning some points, and adding it to my collection, but it's not the greatest reference book for me.

[Caitlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the gardens in this book are beautiful, I feel they were all too similar to make reading the book worthwhile. Despite featuring different categories of garden, such as culturally informed, flower cutting, etc. all of these gardens feature essentially the same plants, the same style, and the same climate. If you are interested in having a garden like the ones Bennett's company designs, and you happen to live in California, this is the book for you. Otherwise, I'd look elsewhere.

[Holly Kramer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leslie Bennet and Julie Chai create a reference showing connections between people and landscape. The book gives readers basic design tips. Then shows beautiful photos of backyard/front yard landscapes that are useful, personalized, and enjoyable. The landscape photos indicate different design styles and highlight the owners personal preferences. The landscape pictures are worth the read.

[Kelsey Gauthier · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5⭐️
Amazing photography! Really was more of an inspo book for me to get ideas for laying out my backyard garden!

[Solarpunkmom · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best gardening books I’ve read in a long time. The design advice was great! Definitely inspired me for next year!

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really wonderful book with lovely garden ideas…..if you love in places that stay warm year round. Not much for places like Canada. That being said there are great ideas for design in the book

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I win the lottery and buy my house in the sticks, Leslie Bennett is totally designing my yard.