If you've got a client with a contemporary-style residence, you should be designing a modern garden to go along with it. And what's a modern garden these days? You'll find out in Gardens for Modern Houses by author Beth Dunlop (Rizzoli USA, 2025).
The book features 30 gardens from Connecticut to Midwest states, to Florida and California. All of the houses are mid-century modern, by some of this country's most famous architects, and all have recently been renovated. The original gardens were designed by some of our most famous landscape architects, including Dan Kiley, Garrett Eckbo, Thomas Church, James Rose and several others. To go with the renovated houses, many of the gardens also needed work, and our current leading landscape architects were happy to oblige, in keeping with the original designs. You'll recognize and be inspired by the work of Mia Lehrer, Raymond Jungles, Steve Martino, the Wagner Hodgson, Reed Hilderbrand and Marmol Radziner firms, among others.
As Dunlop explains in the introduction, "The main goals of the modern garden for the modern house were the essential ones: to unify house and garden both visually and physically, to create outdoor rooms, and to minimize maintenance and maximize the aesthetics — whether it was seasonal (as it was in much of the northern two-thirds of the country) or potentially year-round."
This is an essential book for every landscape architect or designer, whether you're designing for a contemporary residence or not.
I've always had great admiration for garden photographers, because they see what we don't see, notice what we might skip over, and bring their vast knowledge of plants and hardscapes to life through the lens.
In The Spirited Garden:Creative Private Retreats (Rizzoli USA, 2025) by garden photographer Doreen L. Wynja, written with Lorene Edwards Forkner, you'll find 16 gardens lovingly created by their owners throughout the Pacific Northwest.
There's an essay that accompanies each entry, explaining the garden's history and its theme. Favorite plants are also listed, and of course there are gorgeous photographs of each that will inspire any gardener, no matter if you live in a different party of the country.
As Wynja says in the preface to the book, "These gardens are about the people behind them, their journeys, and how their passions inspired me to use my lens to share their soulful, yet often humble, stories with the world…these gardens are very personal reflections of their creators, every one of them invested with heart and soul. This is garden-making expressed by that inner drive or need, that visceral, almost primal urge to be part of nature that at times can be an amazing, sensual experience."
The photos you'll see in this book, along with the stories that go with them, are an essential part of the art of gardening.
Small commissions earned on any book sales.
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