Product Description

By day, Bunny Williams is one of New York's most successful interior designers, a woman whose hours are filled with high-powered meetings, magazine photo shoots, and detailed consultations with clients. But when the week shades into Friday evening, Bunny can be found in the idyllic retreat of her Connecticut garden, the emotional center of her life and the source of perhaps her greatest creative efforts. After five days at the top of the design world, nothing means more to this warm and brilliant woman than to spend the next two with her hands in the dirt, musing about the effect of trees and flowers, paths and benches.

The passion Bunny feels for her garden is a deep one shared by countless others -- in the country, in the suburbs, and even in the city. Gardening has become America's favorite pastime, but its vocabulary remains intimidating, even to those fluent in the language of style and design. Applying the lessons we've learned about interior space to the outdoors is a good idea, but it doesn't work without help: before we can decorate the outdoor room we need to understand its character, and few people can guide us to that understanding better than Bunny Williams.

Style and sophistication are the central issues here, just as they were when The Silver Palate, Martha Stewart, and even Julia Child first convinced Americans that they could entertain and cook and decorate with panache. Gardening with style is also possible for everyone, Bunny insists, and she proceeds to show us how to think about context, the texture of foliage, and the pattern of the garden. This is not a botanical or technical manual, nor is it a dream book filled with lovely pictures and little information. Instead, Bunny has created a garden-design style book with significant practical content and an extraordinary sense of its own style -- an aesthetic how-to, as it were, with fresh, surprising, and attainable.

On Garden Style elevates our aesthetic sense, introducing both novice and experienced gardeners to new ways of thinking about style, form, ornament, and the look and feel of a garden, even as it allows us to appreciate the small details inherent in the placement of a watering can, the texture of a stone path, or the color of a hedge backing an old wooden bench. While other gardening books provide us with the basics of growing and nurturing plants or the elements of landscape design, this stunningly designed volume shows us how to fill our gardens with nuance, personality, and true style.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #255960 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

A great garden design book in plain and simple English
You can look at a garden in many different ways. As a renown interior designer and president of one of the country's leading interior design firm, Bunny Williams views gardens as outdoor rooms. She applies the universal design principles that are common to architecture, landscape architecture and interior design to her garden design and achieves amazing results.

"On Garden Style" has five parts that includes 15 chapters. It covers a number of topics including imagine (personal style and putting your dreams to work, etc.), good bones make good rooms (garden walls, floor and passageway, and roof overhead), furnishing the garden (containers, ornament and furniture), planting with style (inspired planting, kitchen garden, and maintenance), the gardener in winter, selected gardens, garden guides, plant lists, and container planting schemes.

In "On Garden Style," Bunny Williams and Nancy Drew explain complicated design principles in plain and simple English and introduce them to ordinary garden lovers.

"On Garden Style" has 288 pages and many beautiful interior photos. It is a great garden design book in plain and simple English.

Gang Chen, Author of "LEED AP Exam Guide" & "Planting Design Illustrated." LEED AP, AIA

Best of the garden design books
When I first moved into my new house (it was my first house) I read several books on garden design that would give me some kind of orientation about what to do with my back yard. It was a mess. Ms. William's book stood out (and still does) as the book that was most helpful and inspiring at the same time. It is beautifully written and well organized, and takes you through all aspects and stages of garden design, from principle to execution. Threaded throughout the book is a philosophy of restraint that I have learned is so important for the garden or any other designer who aims at the achievement of quiet beauty in his/her environment. Ms. William's book (accompanied with the beautiful prose of Nancy Drew, writer on garden life) is certainly a must have for anyone starting out in garen design, and the photographs make the book worth having for any garden enthusiast. I was shocked to see that no one had given it a five star rating till now!