Garden Design Bible: 40 great off-the-peg designs – Detailed planting plans – Step-by-step projects – Gardens to adapt for your space Paperback – 15 April 2007

What a fab book! I am an experienced gardener although in recent times I have concentrated more on hard landscaping and really not paid much attention to what I put where and added things more or less on a whim; it sort of worked, but not always! In my new garden of just a few months I have all the hard landscaping I need, but a planting scheme that needs reviving with not really too much idea of where to start. This is a great book for this situation, good detail of plants and plans, lots of ideas, easy to follow and vey engaging. Not sure how useful it would be for a very inexperienced gardener (may need some additional guidance on the basics perhaps), but would recommend to more or less anyone.

Good read

This colourful book presents lots of blueprints for different styles of garden design. Each design is beautifully and consistently laid out. With lots of ideas, plans and sketches and plentiful suggestions for plant types appropriate for each design. There are also suggestions as to how to tweak the presented plans for added variety. I've taken one star off for the Kindle version not being in native Kindle format; I can't annotate it which I find frustrating.

This book is full of ideas! The illustrations and detailed explanations provide a myriad of ways to achieve the garden of your dreams.

good advice - but not much different to any other garden design book

like what I said above

Went down well with a professional gardener, so it must be useful.

The first thing to say is that this is just a second re-issue of the book which was first published in 2004 with a different cover, and re-issued in 2007. I haven't compared each and every page but as far as I can see the book is identical in every respect with no updates or enhancements.The forty garden plans vary in size from a balcony to a courtyard to larger gardens of differing shapes. There is also a wide variety of types and styles - contemporary, formal, country, Mediterranean, Japanese, jungly, hot & dry, woodland, cottage, exposed. Each garden gets a plan (no dimensions are given), and drawings of how it might look, a planting plan and details/drawings of key features such as bespoke fencing ideas, construction materials, etc.. There is plenty of inspiration to be had and ideas that can be picked from one garden and used in a different garden. I design gardens for a living but fully appreciate that not everyone can afford to engage a designer: this book takes some of the principles and allows even relatively inexperienced gardeners to take a critical look at their plot. It has to be said that the book is a little dated now and there isn't much that a designer will find innovative or surprising but for the amateur there are worse places to start.