Homefront in the Garden - Hardcover

Gavin, Diarmuid

3.57

7 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 056355102X ISBN 13: 9780563551027

Publisher: BBC Books, 2000

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Garden design may seem demanding, difficult and exclusively for those with experience and a limitless budget, but Diarmuid Gavin thinks differently. The "infant terrible" of the garden design world, Diarmuid sets out to demystify the subject and push back the boundaries of garden style. Viewing the garden as another room for your house, Diarmuid shows how to create a garden to reflect your own personality. Chapters include: Choice and inspiration combining what you require and what you desire and where to look for inspiration; Materials and colour shapes and structures for your 'room outside' and how to use colour in the garden; Project planning planning ahead, working through the stages and where to turn for advice along the way; Plant essentials preparing soil and considering position, light, water and wind; and Building lines using fences and walls to enhance your design.

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Review:

Diarmuid Gavin came to popular attention as the gardening half of the design team in the television series Home Front, with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen (Ginger to Gavin's Fred). Home Front in the Garden sees him on his own, showcasing his striking architectural garden fantasies. It would be safe to say that these tend to the extravagant end of the garden spectrum, a long way from the flower-filled paradises of Vita Sackville-West or Rosemary Verey. Gavin confesses to being inspired by, among other influences, the sets of old Star Trek episodes. This is postmodernist gardening with a vengeance. A long, narrow garden is transversely divided by a huge steel shark's fin; a serpentine hill, studded with lights, extends the length of another space, ending in a mound that conceals a cave; a glass cube room hovers above a pool surrounded by a rainforest garden of ferns and other flowerless exotics. Gavin provides a comprehensive outline of the principles underlying his approach and explores in some depth the properties of the materials, some of them new, some merely new to the garden, which allow him to express with such vividness the personalities and lifestyles of his patrons. Nor does he neglect plants. A number of detailed case-studies show his ideas and theories at work. This is powerfully inspirational gardening, though definitely not for the nervous. --Robin Davidson

From the Author:

A garden doesn't have to have wild or unexpected twists to excite me. Planting is foremost �V whether set out by a designer or arrived at over years in a haphazard manner. I've been learning about gardening for a long time and that journey has led me through a period of creating a variety of styles. Some have been beautiful, some have been bland. The lack of a market for the more progressive ideas led to a personal stagnation for some years and it is only now thorough Home Front in the Garden that I feel that I am back learning. It has been a fascinating experience exploring the use of some new materials, colours and plants in a more subtle and yet challenging way, a combination of suburban, traditional and modern. It is these ideas together with my passion for plants that I bring to you in this book.

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