On Garden Style

by Bunny Williams, Nancy Drew, John Roselli (Illustrator)

By day, Bunny Williams is one of New York's most successful interior designers, a woman whose hours are filled with high-powered meetings, magazine photo shoots, and detailed consultations with clients. But when the week shades into Friday evening, Bunny can be found in the idyllic retreat of her Connecticut garden, the emotional center of her life and the source of perhaps her greatest creative efforts. After five days at the top of the design world, nothing means more to this warm and brilliant woman than to spend the next two with her hands in the dirt, musing about the effect of trees and flowers, paths and benches.

The passion Bunny feels for her garden is a deep one shared by countless others -- in the country, in the suburbs, and even in the city. Gardening has become America's favorite pastime, but its vocabulary remains intimidating, even to those fluent in the language of style and design. Applying the lessons we've learned about interior space to the outdoors is a good idea, but it doesn't work without help: before we can decorate the outdoor room we need to understand its character, and few people can guide us to that understanding better than Bunny Williams.

Style and sophistication are the central issues here, just as they were when The Silver Palate, Martha Stewart, and even Julia Child first convinced Americans that they could entertain and cook and decorate with panache. Gardening with style is also possible for everyone, Bunny insists, and she proceeds to show us how to think about context, the texture of foliage, and the pattern of the garden. This is not a botanical or technical manual, nor is it a dream book filled with lovely pictures and little information. Instead, Bunny has created a garden-design style book with significant practical content and an extraordinary sense of its own style -- an aesthetic how-to, as it were, with fresh, surprising, and attainable.

On Garden Style elevates our aesthetic sense, introducing both novice and experienced gardeners to new ways of thinking about style, form, ornament, and the look and feel of a garden, even as it allows us to appreciate the small details inherent in the placement of a watering can, the texture of a stone path, or the color of a hedge backing an old wooden bench. While other gardening books provide us with the basics of growing and nurturing plants or the elements of landscape design, this stunningly designed volume shows us how to fill our gardens with nuance, personality, and true style.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction, Photography

288 pages, Hardcover

First published February 11, 1998

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This oversized coffee table book is a cornucopia of written knowledge and visual delights! For someone who had to be coaxed into writing this book, Bunny has done a stellar job.

Starting out as she works in the office of an interior design company she recalled childhood times of fresh veggies eating off the vine and thus began her again for a back to nature adventure. She and hubby rented a cottage in Connecticut and started on their learning via catalogs and trial and error. They wound up buying a Connecticut house where they had carte blanche on what, where and when she did with the yard. She later even opened up her own garden store with a friend.

I loved her concept of a perennial border not being a garden any more than a couch is a room. Yes! Her interior design background took front and center in regards to how she designed her own yard and subsequent gardens therein.

Dressing the bones - what a fabulous analogy - she likens to runway models. Plant around the obvious with surprises..

There is near step by step to designing the garden, from the house on out, encompassing the neighbors as well as the neighborhood as a whole. (Some thing I refuse to do, more I set an example of what might be if they would only give up the ugliness of plain old grass.)

There are plenty of nods given to other gardeners and Gardens, both historically and of today.

Tips on designing garden rooms from the “ceiling” and walls down to the ground, including all the tchotchkes to whimsy it up a bit. The laying out of plans, be it by string, hose, flour, to mocking it up with pipe cleaners and cardboard. I also like her idea of using photos with tissue paper over to draw ideas on.

Select histories on certain gardens and styles are noted as well as photos from various Gardens she has visited internationally. In fact nearly every other page is a full color photo of a garden or a section there of.

Paragraphs on walls, fences, gates, terraces, decks, steps, and walkways as well as every other aspect involved in creating a fabulous garden. Garden rooms and special selections, as in the kitchen garden, (of which her own is super fabulous), are well thought out and explained.

Bringing up the end is of course the maintenance of your gorgeous creation and a few winter shots to show how even when the green is gone there is still beauty.

A list of US gardens, a plant list that is sectioned off as to use and where best suited and why, container planting schemes, further books suggestions and endnotes close this up as a start to finish, VERY informed and visually appealing book to add to your gardening collection.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful, visually appealing book! Bunny Williams, the famed interior designer, also has a serious knack for designing outdoor spaces. Her advice is salient; her photos are very well chosen; and her choices of poems and quotes add such a pleasant, refined air to the process of garden planning. I also love that she drew heavily on the writings of Vita Sackville-West and Edith Wharton in her garden research. Although most of the gardens featured here would require a full-time gardener to maintain, there's lots of inspiration here. Recommended to people interested in plants.

[Christine55416 · Rating 5 out of 5]

informative, beautiful, deals more with garden form in relation to your surroundings, home, land, neighbors, garden art, furniture, than actual plants and color selections. Bunny Williams uses same approach for designing a garden as designing a room in a home, looking to a person's personality, wardrobe, style, habits. so many interesting things in this book on the basics of design.

[Onceinabluemoon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book, I have a very large garden and it brought back all the years of planning, we are looking for new property and I can't wait to start all over again. Love formal gardens with classic lines and pieces, loads of wonderful pictures.

[Jennifer Brogdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned. so. much. from. this. book. I’ve had ideas and have even lost sleep trying to figure out how to plan the landscape of the acreage we just purchased. This book helped me plan strategically as I thought about enclosure and garden rooms—height and color, etc.

[Annie Oosterwyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't wait to get outside! This book has lots of inspirational photos and good ideas for planning your spring attack.

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an inspiring book for late winter in the Midwest.

[Amanda Bright · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn’t give me the inspiration I was hoping for.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is almost as practical as it is beautiful.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb!!!' On Garden Style by Bunny Williams is a must read for any avid gardener or landscape artist. She shares her infinite knowledge of garden design in brief, well-organized contexts. A beautiful coffee-table book that will serve as a garden reference for years to come!

[Sondra Boykin · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful but too formal for my taste

[Mary Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dreamy. Traditional gardens. Gorgeous photos. Not so much practical info.