Small Garden Style: A Design Guide for Outdoor Rooms and Containers

by Isa Hendry Eaton, Jennifer Blaise Kramer

Overview

A stylishly photographed guide to creating lush, layered, dramatic little gardens no matter the size of your available space--an urban patio, a tiny backyard, or even just a pot by your door.

Petite gardens align with the movement to live smaller and create a life with less stuff and more room for living. But a more eco-friendly and efficient space doesn't have to sacrifice style. In Small Garden Style, garden designer Isa Hendry Eaton and lifestyle writer Jennifer Blaise Kramer show you how to use good design to create a joyful, elegant, and exciting yet compact outdoor living space for entertaining or relaxing.

A style quiz helps you focus in on your own personal garden style, be it traditional, modern, colorful, eclectic, minimalist, or globally inspired, then utilize every inch of your yard by considering the horizontal, vertical, and overhead spaces. You'll learn how to design stunning planters and container gardens using succulents, grasses, vibrant-colored pots, and more. Hendry Eaton and Blaise Kramer recommend their favorite plants and decor for small gardens, along with lawn alternatives and inspiration for making garden accents such as a fire pit, front door wreath, instant mini orchard, boulder birdbath, patterned vines, perfumed wall, and faux fountain with cascading plants.

However small your garden, Small Garden Style will transform it into a magical, modern outdoor oasis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399582868
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	02/04/2020
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	38 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

After a career in graphic design, Isa Hendry Eaton applied her skills to the garden, launching Isa Bird Landscape Design with clients such as the famed Montecito Inn. Her work has been featured in Better Homes & Gardens, HGTV, and Garden Design magazines.

Jennifer Blaise Kramer has twenty years' experience as a home and lifestyle writer for national and regional publications.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

Small gardens are enchanting. It’s no accident that Frances Hodgson Burnett’s captivating childhood classic, The Secret Garden, told a story of transformation against the backdrop of a little garden that could. With heart and hard work, children nurtured this neglected space until everyone and everything inside the enclosed walls became the best version of themselves. That’s the promise of a garden—a joyful place where we can use the power of the outdoors to refuel and reconnect with our friends and family. With a little thought and planning, small spaces in particular can serve as the most livable and lovely garden rooms that truly expand our living space and fulfill that promise of beauty, joy, and connection.

Whatever your space—an urban balcony, a postage stamp patio, or a suburban backyard—this book will help you define and refine your bit of earth. Maybe you’re looking for a full garden makeover or you simply want to fluff the porch with new pots that complement your house and reflect your indoor style; we’ve got your back.

Containers are a great way to try out new garden tricks before moving onto larger spaces. They can also play a starring role in a well-designed small garden. They can add architectural interest (without hiring an architect), soften a space to make it feel like a warm hug after work, or define a confusing entry so your guests stop wandering in through the side gate. Containers accomplish all of this and have the flexibility to move with you if you move on.

However small in square footage, your garden can be as brilliant and transporting as possible, and we will get you there. Like any project, the magic is achieved with a little thought and planning before stepping foot in a garden shop. Heading to the nursery without a plan is like going to the grocery store hungry. You might buy heaps of beautiful ingredients, but you can’t cook a balanced a meal when you get home, let alone impress your dinner guests. Just as a beloved cookbook is a reassuring guide for the kitchen, we hope this book will become your garden confidant, your source for continued inspiration translated into real recipes with professional tips and tricks to streamline the shopping and spruce up the garden, while giving answers along the way to those inevitable questions.

When we first brainstormed this book, recipes were front and center. Much like you’d build out your dinner from scratch, we wanted to start with a small, manageable space—or even the smallest garden planter—and provide a step-by-step guide full of how-to tips, winning combinations, and the design thinking behind why certain plants work together. We also wanted to pull style into the conversation to connect your personal point of view and secret lifestyle aspirations (how you dream to live!) to your own outdoor space. Small Garden Style is all of that, sharing our best secrets and plant recipes along with other easy, accessible ideas for a range of small garden styles.

Some of you might be seasoned pros looking for insider secrets—you’ve come to the right place! Or you might be a garden novice reading these pages with trepidation—no worries, you have nothing to fear! Because guess what—we are all of you. Your two authors, Isa and Jenny, are friends, writers, fellow moms of three each, and nearly neighbors, living a mile apart in Santa Barbara. We have lived in the Northeast, Midwest, and Northwest before landing permanently in California. We understand first-hand what it means to garden small—from potted herbs on the San Francisco fire escape, to seasonal shrubs on a Minneapolis front porch, to winterized boxwoods on a Boston brick patio, to our own Santa Barbara gardens with a bit more sunshine. Even the professional Isa Bird Landscape Design projects that cover several acres still require smaller, defined, outdoor rooms to make the gardens comfortable for living.

One of us is seasoned and one of us is a newcomer, and together we keep it real and keep it fun. Isa, the pro, launched Isa Bird Landscape Design as a natural extension of her graphic design and letterpress business, combining her deep knowledge of plants with a career understanding of visual communication that makes her real-life designs graphic, layered, and lush whether big or small. Isa’s gardens have also been photographed for Better Homes and Gardens, HGTV Magazine, Garden Design magazine, and Santa Barbara  Magazine. Jenny, the enthusiastic rookie gardener, is a design writer who has spent two decades covering homes and gardens across the country for publications including Better Homes and Gardens, Condé Nast Traveler, Domino, House Beautiful, and Sunset. She can reupholster living room chairs in vintage fabric or confidently match tile and wallpaper, yet the garden store to garden bed crisis was real. Learning the ropes from a pro came with a lot of laughs, coffees, and croissants in Jenny’s secret olive garden, and homegrown salads and fizzy drinks on Isa’s treehouse deck (sensing a food theme here?). Under the blue sky, we talked about how to relay the best garden advice to others in a fresh way that feels like those favorite cookbooks and design books, not like a plant encyclopedia. Our common goal? How to break it down without having a breakdown.

Together, we hope this book helps you think about your small garden as another room of your home. Just like the interiors, the outdoor space should be defined with garden “floors” covered with gravel, gorgeous ground cover, or creeping herbs and “walls” made of a leafy hedge or a striking row of potted trees. In this book you’ll find easy ways to get started right away on everything from the design process (yes, you can plan and spray paint a pathway like a pro) to getting your hands dirty arranging striking plant groupings. Trust us, you’ll never wind up in a nursery nightmare again with this strategy. We have weekend projects from vertical gardens to instant orchards, front-door wreaths to easy water features. Call your guests: you’ll be throwing that magazine-style garden party before you know it. Small gardens, big style, that’s our promise. Loving and living in your garden—just like your other favorite rooms inside—is what it’s all about. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get started; we’re here for you.

XO

Isa + Jenny

Editorial Reviews

Whether you’re buying your first tree or are a more ambitious gardener, Small Garden Style seamlessly guides you through inspiration, design, planting, and (the hardest part for me) keeping everything alive. A great resource.”—Nate Berkus

“The world is full of gardens that look like they were designed from other people’s Pinterest images. Small Garden Style helps you figure out your own gardening personality and how to make a space that reflects who you really are.”—Stephen Orr, editor in chief of Better Homes & Gardens

“Inspiring, enchanting, yet completely accessible . . . living outside has never felt so within reach. Frankly, even if you don’t have an inch of outdoor space, you’ll still be totally transported.”—Joanna Saltz, editorial director of House Beautiful

“Finally, garden and design come together seamlessly in this gorgeous, more-than-a-gardening book where authors Isa and Jenny enthusiastically walk us through dozens of outdoor rooms and teach us how to masterfully create our very own stylish retreat no matter how big or small our space.”—Steele Marcoux, editor in chief of Veranda

“Gardens can be the most magical part of any home and this luscious new book absolutely inspired me to get right out into my own garden and fix it up. The photos and all the lovely ideas within them are so accessible and delicious you won’t put this book down.”—Maxwell Ryan, founder of Apartment Therapy

From the Publisher