BOOKreviews
Deer-Resistant Design: Fence-free Gardens that Thrive Despite the Deer Author: Karen Chapman Publisher: Timber Press List price: $24.95 Order link: https://amzn.to/2E1biSl Reviewer: Beth Py-Lieberman Landscape designer Karen Chapman, like all gardeners, faces the extraordinary challenge of keeping the widely distributed, voracious North American ungulate Odocoileus virginianus from eating the flowers. We’re talking deer here. Chapman’s book Deer-Resistant Design promises “lush, deer-defying” gardens, and in a series of 13 stunning case histories, plus an array of deerresistant container gardens, she delivers. But every time, I turned a page, I could hear the ka-ching of the cash register. Oh, the heights you can scale if money is no object. Chapman’s own home in Duvall, Washington, in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains is a magnificent, sprawling five-acre compound that includes, besides the main home, a greenhouse, barn, and small cabin. An idyllic patio for entertaining with raised planters is backed by a delightful double-fenced vegetable garden with two entrance gates. (The author’s neighbor chides her after the extraordinary expense she has gone to keep out, not only the deer, but the rabbits and the voles: “Karen, there are perfectly good stores where you can buy parsnips.”) The property is an immense wonder of calculated vistas and glorious gardening successes, with a woodland border along a seasonal stream and a meadow that backs a sloping lawn. In Stevensville, Michigan, at a vacation home overlooking the Great 20
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Lake, groundhogs join deer and rabbits chomping on the daylilies and coneflowers. Local artist Ted Brooks drops in an enormous “Egg” sculpture, crafted of nine tons of Fond du Lac flagstone, and the owners are off to the races with a glorious and enviable fountain garden, and other masterful outdoor rooms. A country garden in Essex Falls, New Jersey, with a pool, spa, pool house, and pergola wouldn’t be complete without a checkerboard patio. In Austin, Texas, besides deer and rabbits, armadillos upend new plantings, but gorgeous drought-resistant plantings like pale-leaf yucca, variegated flax lily, and the bold paddles of a spineless prickly pear cleverly hold pride of place and defy the pests. And in Portland, Oregon, where gophers and elk, join the gang of the usual pests, the home’s adjacent poolside yoga pavilion is complemented by the large boulders of a bubbling waterfall emptying into a pond surrounded, of course, by deer-resistant perennials, wildflowers, grasses, and shrubs. But for the hale and hearty and with the strength of our convictions, we of the ordinary paycheck can borrow by example from some of these amazing high-end garden designs. On paging through each design confection, the payoff is the list of “Top 10 Plants” that enhances each garden. So many gardens can be saved from insatiable chompers, if only the right selections are made—’Jacob Cline’ bee balm, Jerusalem sage, American beautyberry, pink skullcap, northern maidenhair fern, viburnums, lilacs, astilbe, rosemary, coneflowers, the sages, laurels, daisies, maples, hollies, junipers. The lists, complete with identifying pictures, are worth the investment in this book. Now to choose a favorite landscape among this compendium of enviable and absolutely fabulous outdoor fairytale spaces. On a steep hillside challenged by erosion and shade in Charlotte, North Carolina, a wildly imaginative forest sprite took up residence in a tree-top mountain cabin with his Basset Hound Georgia Mae, a cockatoo, a parrot, and a cranky macaw. His name is Jay Sifford and I want to be his bestie and spend long afternoons with him in this storybook wonderland with a tiered waterfall, a koi pond, clever craftings, and other eccentricities. Sifford, after years of careful study, struggle, and error, has
created a bohemian retreat where bald cypresses are trained over passageways from one garden room to another, and gravel pathways and granite stone steps meander through a symphony of plantings orchestrated to complement the multiple hues and patterns of the forest greens. Japanese white pine, Rocky Mountain juniper, and Norway spruce provide cover for the tender hostas and coral bells. The dappled light and shadow of his fern glen is the perfect opportunity to nestle in a boardwalk or on a deck painted Chinese enamel red. The studied effects of this do-it-himselfer is balm to the soul for the many of us who try to eke-out a garden with just perseverance, physical strength, and the money left over after the bills are paid. Sifford is the every-person gardener having made the mistake of putting in a garden that has to be watered and so he does it, just like any of us would, with a glass of wine in one hand and the hose in the other, and after three glasses, his garden is watered. o Beth Py-Lieberman is Smithsonian magazine’s museums editor. She gardens at home with visiting deer in Silver Spring, MD, and is the volunteer liaison for the Fenton Street Community Garden.
The Story of Gardening Author: Penelope Hobhouse with Ambra Edwards Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press List price: $60.00 Order link: https://amzn.to/34agzSq Reviewer: Jim Dronenburg In 2002, Penelope Hobhouse published The Story of Gardening. It was a mainstream book, and a good one. Now there is a new edition, updated and expanded with the advances of the last 18 years, by Ambra Edwards. Understand, please, that praise of the current version does not imply non-praise of the older one. Both are highly informative. Setting both side-by -side, not only does the text change—in parts—but so does the layout. And some of the illustrations are the same, some different. Since the book deals with gardens for beauty and repose rather than farming food crops, this history of gardening starts out with the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and then switches over to Greece and Rome. Obviously, records are sketchy the farther back you go,