P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home by P. Allen Smith

 P. Allen Smith's Garden Home by P. Allen Smith

This book came out in 2003, and the subtitle is Creating a Garden for Everyday Living.

Well, to me, this book is a garden classic. You get to know a little bit about P. Allen Smith's biography. His family's love of gardens, his experience working in the nursery business - plus all the great relationships he made working in some of England's top gardens. (He could write a book on that alone.) Fascinating stories.

But in all seriousness, this book is so foundational to gardening. It's a great book to give new gardeners. It's also an excellent book for gardeners considering a redesign or feeling like they need to brush up on their skills after a long winter.

This book is dedicated to Allen's twelve garden design principles. He discusses aspects like framing a view, having texture in the garden, rhythm, pattern, and color.

I thought I'd share this little excerpt from Allen's introduction. Here, he talks about how he created the garden rooms on his own property.

He writes,

I began working out the various outdoor rooms to see how they related to the
house itself. The shape to one another and to the of the house and the lot created a series of rectangular spaces. 

I recognized an opportunity to design strong unbroken lines of sight or axes from one garden room into the next. Like an open door, these visual sight lines would allow visitors to stand in one room and see directly into the next.

After positioning these openings through portals or entries further divided the rectangles into nine garden rooms and began to imagine how each space could have its own personality yet remain a part of a cohesive whole. 

And then I love what he says next. Because he's talking about paths, and I always feel like paths are so underrated; they're almost an afterthought for so many gardeners. So

Allen says,

As I laid out this plan on paper, I added an entire circuit or path that looped
around the house, connecting one garden room to the next.

From here, I imagined hedges and fences that would serve as "walls" for each room, with arbors and gates as "doorways."

He then goes on to talk about how he created these garden rooms.

In this book, Allen discusses his twelve principles of design and takes you on a tour through each of his garden rooms, which help illustrate each principle. It's a fabulous book. It's a garden basic—and it's so affordable now that it's been on the market so long.

This book is 224 pages of P. Allen Smith's expertise, his twelve principles of garden design, and his fantastic personal garden.

You can get a copy of P. Allen Smith's Garden Home by P. Allen Smith and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show notes for around $3.