INTRODUCTION Consider us your garden doctors, here to make a house call, even if only metaphorically, but with varied prescriptions for your landscape’s health. We wrote The Garden Bible: Designing your perfect outdoor space to be a clear, concise and invaluable resource for everyone—from the neophyte to seasoned gardener. Whether you landscape yourself or hire experts, this book will help you maximize your site’s potential in numerous ways based on topography, size (large, small, or in between), location, soil, amount of sunlight and shade, climate, orientation to other houses and the street, budget, and special challenges such as wildlife, drought, and building codes and requirements. The outdoor environment is not just a place for planting material such as trees and shrubs, but it can also improve natural resources, your physical and mental well-being, and your home’s value, just as your indoor rooms do. A well-designed site isn’t just one component either, but a series of parts that should in the end look cohesive, well tended, and most of all, loved. Each should have its own special function, or sometimes multiple ones, and reflect your personal style. Front yards offer a first impression of your style and personality and can affect the value of your property, hence the term “curb appeal.” Your back yard usually provides more private space and is typically the better site to satisfy your wish list for how you want to use your outdoors. Your home also requires practical service areas—often in your side yard where you can keep and conceal such items as trash cans, tools, storage sheds, air-conditioning condensers, and pool pumps.
Sounds like a steep challenge? Yes, but with proper planning, it becomes a major success. This book will inspire you to dream and see different possibilities. Its prime purpose is to give you the information you need to enjoy time outdoors and identify what works and what does not. Our content features a wide variety of gardens, sometimes with before and after photographs. They range from small, tranquil Zen-style gardens, to large traditional designs with formal beds, clipped hedges, and stately trees, with numerous variations in between. Many are presented in Chapter 7: Great Gardens to Inspire (page 78) as case studies of how landscape designers and architects solve common site challenges with creative solutions. From these studies, you can identify ideas that reflect your own landscape dilemmas and choose the best choices to fit your needs financially, functionally, and visually.
We walk you through the entire process, whatever your goals, in the proper order to make it all less daunting and more successful: • Heighten your understanding of your site and climate. • Develop a budget that is comfortable, takes into account how long you plan to stay in the property, and reflects your home’s value and neighborhood prices and styles. • Hire the right professionals to advise you, make some or all of the installations, and continue to improve and maintain them. • Create a master plan that maps out your entire yard’s needs from the start, which you can install all at once or in stages, depending on your funds. • Learn to analyze and solve problems that are indigenous to your site and climate, or that crop up as conditions change.
Opposite: A narrow shade garden on Buffalo’s Bidwell Parkway during the annual Garden Walk Buffalo tour.
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