Garden Design

Here you can find stories about garden design, including planning and garden layout; using design techniques like form, texture, contrast and repetition; working with proportion and shaping spaces; uniting hardscape and plants; looking at gardens to understand why some things work – and others don’t; finding out about the lessons and ideas we can pick up from show gardens; incorporating garden decoration; and using garden design to evoke emotion. GardenDrum has stories on a wide range of garden styles and sizes, from the tiniest courtyard, to suburban backyards and large acreage country gardens. For more in-depth design stories, join GardenDrum so you can visit the Garden Design Centre.

War Gardens – a review

Stuart Read
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This book and its theme are timely and poignant. We won’t stop waging wars. Some parts of the globe have long histories of it with competition for resources, land, water, trade and souls. Dwindling water supplies suggest more will come. We also won’t stop gardening – for food, shelter, beauty, solace – and this book is revealing on why. What gardening does for us – something that seems worth pondering and talking-up, as peace-fostering.

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Instant city garden oasis

GardenDrum
Reply

Garden designer Robert Boyle’s client had dreams of a very private city garden, only to discover the adjoining property, which they had just purchased to create their back-garden oasis, would be overlooked and dominated by a large development on a neighbour’s property.

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Naples Botanical Garden

Christopher Woods
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Horticulture can be an undisciplined craft—the lack of set rules sometimes gives rise to brilliance, sometimes not. Those with unbridled enthusiasm for plants tend to chafe under the restraint of design while designers often complain that gardeners are messing things up. Fortunately, horticulture and design partnered to make the Naples Botanical Garden garden a true joy.

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Rydal daffodils

Lindsay Green
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The small village of Rydal nearly 1000 metres above sea level has the ideal climate for growing daffodils and like its namesake in England where William Wordsworth lived for a time and wrote about daffodils, Rydal New South Wales can present a host of golden daffodils.

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Going potty

Jennifer Stackhouse
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When the weather’s cold, days are short and the soil is wet, there’s little incentive to get out into the garden. Winter needn’t be dull downtime however if the garden includes some large containers arranged in a sunny spot.

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