THE GARDENS OF EDEN
by Abbye Churchill (ed Gestalten)
Gestalten, £35,
ISBN 978-3899559903
A handsome coffee-table book crammed with stunning photographs of innovative garden design for greener urban and domestic life.
Alice Vincent is an author and gardening journalist.
As we all learn to appreciate the green spaces we have access to more, this new book could not be better timed, with a handsome collection of 23 swoon-inducing private gardens, smatterings of encouragement to participate in more community-focussed, family-friendly and sustainable growing and gardener profiles. It offers plenty of dreamy destinations.
Pulled together by Abbye Churchill for architecture and culture publisher Gestalten, The Gardens of Eden aspires to inspire its reader to challenge the norms of domestic garden design and green up our urban landscapes. The book’s curation is its best asset: the sprawl of jaw-dropping gardens ranges from a clever ginnel of a living wall in Sydney to a surface-of-Marslike creation on Chile’s rocky northern coast. Courtesy of stunning photography, we are allowed to peer over the fences of natural sauna ponds in the Netherlands and minimalist native gardens in California.
Each garden is given a lively and informative-enough profile, with plant types and some tips to borrow and adopt in your own plot.
The Gardens of Eden is notably aspirational. Even a tiny, charming front garden in Peckham, south London, cost £14,000 to design (details on how are scant); a low-maintenance garden of an Italian holiday home demands four hours of attention a week to the tune of £5,000 a year.
These details are smuggled into box-outs.
The book includes interviews with the people making these changes, such as Annie Novak, who set up community roof gardens that gaze out at Manhattan’s skyline, or Lauri Krantz, whose hopeful wild and organic edible growing is transforming the gardens of LA’s hoi polloi (Katy Perry has one). Thereare brilliant ideas here, some of which we can include in our own gardens and some of which we can only dream about.