Patio Garden

I have just finished writing the ZEN OF WATERING YOUR GARDEN. Which some may consider a “coffee table book” but it is really a challenge to the reader to get out and garden. This book of public and private gardens is filled with beautiful gardens which I think are nice to look at but untenable for any gardener to achieve. The Zen of Watering provides more practical stimulation to get out and garden with its 70 quotes juxtaposed to 145 full-color photos.
Rating: 3 / 5

The gardens featured are arranged by continent, feature a few descriptive paragraphs, and many show a small picture.

Gardeners looking for inspiration… or for that matter garden afficionados just looking for beautiful pictures will probably be VERY disappointed with this inexplicably pint-sized book (8 1/2 by 6 1/2, but extremely thick).

The gardens themselves are generally massive-scale public gardens, and the majority of the pictures are 3″ by 5″; giant garden/tiny picture is not a combination I’d have gone with. There are some full-page pictures, but even those seem undersized because of the book’s small size and the scale of the gardens pictured. Many of the gardens are not pictured at all, so you’re on your own to “must see” them, because airfare isn’t included.

A little picture of a little piece of an enormous garden with a few accompanying paragraphs mostly concerned with a very brief garden history equals a brochure; this book is really 1001 brochures handsomely stuck together.

Might be kind of useful as a vague “travel-suggestion type guide,” but unfortunately most descriptions don’t advise when is the best time to visit the garden beyond telling us that the tulips and rhododendrons bloom in spring, and you probably knew that already.

It earns the one star because sometimes it’s nice to sit in an armchair and look at brochures of places you’d like to visit, and because there isn’t an option to give zero stars.

Rating: 1 / 5

I’m quite surprised that no earlier reviews mention the fact that this is a very unfortunately organized book! Unlike the “Garden Lovers Guide to ….” series, no introductory annotated maps! There is a Garden Names Index which is useful only if you already know the name of the garden you’d like to learn about! (In which case you probably wouldn’t need this book!) You can start looking at European gardens, for instance, (as noted in the Contents) on page 136. As you begin to flip through the section, you’ll find a few gardens in Russia, followed by one in Norway, one in Finland and then some in Sweden. If you want to find gardens in France or Germany, keep flipping, keep flipping, keep flipping…. through 220 pages on England …. Altogether more than 600 pages, unindexed, of European gardens.

With locator maps and a region-by-region index, this book might have been useful. To be truly useful, it would have included contact information for the garden visitor.

Unfortunately, it has none of the above. The book’s editors must have all been asleep when this one came across the desk!
Rating: 2 / 5