How to Make a Garden: The 7 Essential Steps for the Canadian Gardener

by Marjorie Harris

From Canada’s leading garden expert comes a unique and practical step-by-step guide to creating the garden of your dreams.

With her inimitable charm and boundless knowledge, noted gardener and author Marjorie Harris establishes the template for creating the garden that is right for your tiny urban plot, barren suburban tract, overgrown meadow, condo roof or balcony. Packed with practical advice, helpful sidebars and attractive photographs, How to Make a Garden takes you through Marjorie’s seven essential steps to garden-making – the culmination of twenty-five years of her experience.

Gardening is all about creating shady patches and hot spots, combining exuberant jungles and tailored edges, making social areas and solitary spaces, planting tall trees and delicate groundcovers. To craft a living mosaic requires contemplation and Marjorie calls this unique and necessary step “pregardening.” Once you’ve tackled this thoughtful stage, How to Make a Garden shows you how to create a solid soil foundation for your plantings, establish just the right garden style for you and your site, draw a garden map, select the perfect plants with the indispensable plant list, plant them correctly, and maintain the health and vibrancy of your garden. Marjorie understands all the pitfalls and anxieties gardeners experience, and she counters them with clear-headed, lively advice that is never intimidating and always creative. How to Make a Garden is essential and inspiring reading for every gardener and would-be gardener.

“This book is for people who are baffled by empty spaces, cowed by weeds and longing to have something gorgeous to look at. It’s also for people who have lovely gardens but need to be reminded of the basics – the core ideas that make a garden truly successful.”
—From How to Make a Garden

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction

176 pages, Hardcover

First published March 6, 2007

Reviews

[LostAlias · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read to pg 56 then skimmed to the end. Read what interested me. Informative and well written.

[Nutkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book with practical ideas and steps to take to design or even review a garden. I actually plan to purchase a copy of this book for my own gardening library.

[Deodand · Rating 3 out of 5]

I worry about this book intimidating the beginning gardener. There are quite a few subjects in this book that deserve their own book - and there are many out there to choose from, of course. This book almost tries to do too much in that the author is trying to tell you all you need to know, but at a high speed and in a way that ensures you won't process the information. It's like going to a party, being introduced to everyone, then leaving and being asked to recite everyone's names. Unless you spend some time with the other partygoers and learn more about them, you'll never remember them when you meet them in the street.

I do understand the need for this book; I feel it is worthy of a good read, especially for the lucky few who start out with a blank garden "canvas" and have the time and money to arrange things as they see fit. It's also a good book for someone coming into a garden area that has fallen into disuse or downright abuse, such as I did. Harris reminded me of a few things I should be doing, like composting.

[Lily C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sound advice. Very readable, nice pictures. She spent a lot of time on the planning aspect. I liked the the zone method of considering the space. Many of the plant recommendations were applicable only to the warmer areas of Canada, very few to my zone 4 garden and some of these were marginal.