Beth Chatto's Woodland Garden: Shade-Loving Plants for Year-Round Interest Hardcover | Gardening Book for Shady Yards & Woodland Landscaping | Perfect for Gardeners & Landscape Designers

Previously released in 2002 as The Woodland Garden, this reissue is an elegant, photo-filled journal of Beth Chatto's famous Essex shade garden. The book is a beautifully written reflection on the cycle of the seasons in a garden Chatto has designed and developed over the course of 20-odd years. It is the quintessential woodland garden book, reflecting a particularly British conceit not often found in American garden design. If you are looking for a book on British cottage gardening, this is not the book, nor is it a book on the nuts and bolts of garden design. Rather, it is an ofttimes poetic narrative on shade gardening within nature, liberally sprinkled with Chatto's wit and practical observations on what a woodland garden can be, that very tricky combination of "natural" elements supplemented by all manner of groundcovers, understory trees and shrubs, vines, bulbs, perennials, ferns, grasses--any variation (native or not) that can work in harmony with Nature's canvas and provide year-round visual interest.Seven chapters take the reader from the origin of the garden in 1987 (when a hurricane destroyed part of the Chatto land that had been left in a natural state) and on through the four seasons. Chatto describes the floral highlights of each season, and the accompanying photos vividly complement her engaging text. The final chapter of the book lists many of the plants Chatto used in her garden, some of them with wonderful photos. US readers should note that Chatto gardens in the UK, and some of her plants are not readily available in the US. But Chatto will inspire the motivated to find native substitutes for her European plantings. "Right plant, right place" is after all her saying.There are other books that treat the same subject: Larry Hodgson's "Making the Most of Shade," Ken Druse's "The Natural Shade Garden," and Keith Wiley's "Shade: Ideas and Inspiration for Shade Gardens," to name a few I've read; any of those could be recommended to gardeners interested in learning more about shade/woodland gardening. Read Chatto's book first though, and you'll definitely get more from the others. There is no better book on woodland gardening that I have read than Beth Chatto's "The Shade Garden."