The Inward Garden: Creating a Place of Beauty and Meaning

This is an amazing book with stunning photos. The author shows us the most beautiful gardens around the world and inspires us to recreate those places which has deep meanings to us.

Unlike most garden books that focus on individual design elements of gardening, this one focuses on how to identify the atmosphere and mood of the garden you want to create. The author tells readers to think back to those places that have given them the greatest joy and ease, either as children or as adults, and to use the memory of these places in creating a retreat or garden of the mind in one's own yard. You should read this book before all others

Messervy has found a way to codify something that seemed vague to me: the "feel" of a landscape, or how a person reacts to a space. She breaks landscape forms down into 7 "archetypes," lists the features of each, then suggests ways to use this new understanding in designing your own yard or garden. I suddenly realized, for example, that the narrow, paved alleys coming off my tiny city backyard weren't necessarily the problem and disappointment I had always considered them, but were features I could play up and turn to advantage. (They had always tempted me to walk to the end -- now I just have to make that journey worthwhile.) I was just bursting with ideas after reading this book, able to look at my tiny space with new eyes. The archetypal business isn't just pleasantly mystical but is also practical, backed up with sophisticated but down-to-earth ideas. It's a different kind of garden design book that gets you to think of the overall "f! eel" (not look) you want first (the step missing from most gardening books), and then figure out how to actually construct it -- a satisfying blend of mythic/artistic with practical and well-organized. (And as a bonus, the photos are drop-dead gorgeous!)

Julie Moir Messervy has written what undoubtedly will become a classic of garden writing and design. Deeply literate and beautifully written, The Inward Garden gives the reader a process for designing one's "dream garden". Based on garden archtypes: the sea, the cave, the harbor, the promitory, the island, the mountain, and the sky, this book provides a structure for imagining the garden of one's desires and a practical process for designing this deeply felt garden. The author describes in detail each of these archytical gardens. Each archtype is illustrated with outstanding garden photographs. The Inner Garden gently asks the reader to think and feel deeply about the garden of his or her dreams and to have the couage to begin creating that garden.

This is garden design from the heart, not the head. Garden design books usually offer us a formula, templates, and lists of plants. "The Inward Garden" instead tries to stimulate a new way of thinking about our landscapes. Messervy tries to create gardens that resonate with fond memories of the places where we felt most secure and most free as children. You might think that you want an elaborate perennial border, but after reading this book realize that you'd really rather gaze at a little bit of prairie, or a woodland or listen to a tinkling stream. If you are going to spend all that time, money and effort, wouldn't it be wonderful to have a garden that makes you feel good, instead of one that merely consumes resources and becomes a millstone? This is not the book that will help you calculate how many bags of mulch you need, or how to build a retaining wall. What it will do is help you identify what you really want from your landscape, instead of what you think you're supposed to want, or what all your neighbors have.