PEREN N I AL FOCUS continued from page 11
LATE BLOOMER: HOW TO GARDEN WITH COMFORT, EASE AND SIMPLICITY IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE
Jan Coppola Bills St. Lynn’s Press, 2016 $18.95.
Jan Bills is both a passionate gardener and a landscape designer who brings a different perspective to designing gardens. She believes that gardens should be about happiness, not perfection, and brings a bit of laissez-faire to her creations. Her mantras are simplicity, naturalism, organic materials, and sustainability. Many clients of landscape designers are older people who want to change their gardens in ways that will satisfy their souls but be less demanding of time and effort. Nevertheless, any effort is good exercise and contact with soil bacteria is also beneficial. Jan’s four rules for designing this type of garden are: choose the right plant for the right place, plant for lushness (also known as orderly chaos) to prevent weed growth, make the most of your water, and replicate nature’s ecosystem where possible, especially by leaving the leaves in your beds so that they decay and replenish the soil. (Of course, you’ve never heard that from me before – ha!) She maintains that a sustainable garden can and should be functional, cost efficient, visually attractive, environmentally friendly, and easy to maintain. There are six design tips for creating this type of garden plus an interesting commentary on the use of color and suggestions for personalizing the garden with artful finds. One of the elements of low maintenance is the size of the garden. Thus, Jan maintains that small spaces are not to be disparaged. This is particularly true of edible gardens. If you bite off more than you can chew (literally), you will get discouraged. Sometimes, dissatisfaction with a garden can be mollified by just rearranging the plants. Other times, new beds or new bed lines are needed. I was fascinated with Jan’s take on what to do with unwanted sod so that it doesn’t have to be hauled away. She also has great ideas about water usage, mulching, soil revitalization, and killing weeds.
12 | Official Publication of The Ohio Landscape Association
Late Bloomer may be a small book, but it brings a different perspective for landscape designers and is full of ideas for giving the client gardens they will want to live in.
GARDEN RENOVATION: TRANSFORM YOUR YARD INTO THE GARDEN OF YOUR DREAMS Bobbie Schwartz Timber Press, 2017 $24.95.
Since I’m the author, I did not feel that I could review it for you. Fortunately, Elsa Johnson, a prominent Cleveland landscape architect and permaculture expert reviewed it and published it on the Gardenopolis blog as “One of Our Own.” While she believes the book is written more for the homeowner, I believe that landscape designers will be reminded of all the questions they need to ask their clients. ... In case you cannot tell from the title, the book is written to the homeowner who isn’t prepared to just hand the whole task over to a designer, or landscape architect, with the invitation to “knock my socks off—do something spectacular.” The book is not one of those drool-over-pretty-pictures-of-high-endgardens type books (the kind our bookshelves are so chock full of ) ….and though there are plenty of pretty pictures in this book, some of expensive landscapes, many are of small scale gardens and spaces easier to replicate. So, in many ways this book is aimed toward the do-it-yourself gardener. Chapter One covers all those ordinary reasons that lead one to undertake a re-do. I like that the final paragraph in that chapter introduces the not-so-frequently seen goals (in garden design books) of gardening for sustainability, permaculture, and diverting storm water run-off to on-site uses. I was taken by a picture showing a hillside that hides a children’s play tunnel, charmingly disguised as a hobbit house. Chapter Two gets down to business, mentioning the obvious; that unlike houses and architecture, landscapes and natural environments change. So, the first step in any redesign is taking stock of the existing on-site elements that will affect a garden’s