The Authentic Garden: Five Principles for Cultivating a Sense of Place

Front Cover
Timber Press, 2007 - Gardening - 285 pages

What makes a garden authentic? For American gardeners, this question can be vexing. Because America is a comparatively young nation, it hasn't had much time to develop an indigenous garden style. Gardeners have tended to turn to other national traditions--such as Italy's, Japan's, or England's--for inspiration. The unhappy result of this piecemeal stylistic borrowing has been the creation of gardens that bear no relationship to local landscapes and history, and that have no connection with our daily lives.

Clair Sawyers shows this tendency can be reversed: how we can create gardens that are both deeply rooted in their surroundings and deeply satisfying to their creators and owners. Drawing on her knowledge of a vast array of American and foreign gardens, she identifies five principles that help instill a sense of authenticity: capture the sense of place, derive beauty from function, use humble or indigenous materials, marry the inside to the outside, and involve the visitor.

Practical and inspiring, The Authentic Garden will enable the reader to make a garden that is true to a specific time, place, and culture; to capture and reflect an authentic spirit so that the garden, in turn, will nurture the spirit of those who cherish and dwell in it.

From inside the book

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
9
Derive Beauty from Function
60
The pitfalls of ornamentation without function Fences and walls Driveways
122
Copyright

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About the author (2007)

Claire E. Sawyers has been director of the Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College since 1990, bringing both U.S. and international perspectives to her work. She spent six years of her youth in Japan, and later returned to work with Japanese landscapers. Sawyers has worked in Belgium and France, and holds a master's in horticulture from Purdue.

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