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The book of garden design

Chapter 2: PREFACE.
By Charles Thonger
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About This Book

A practical manual for designing and arranging gardens, presenting general principles—comfort, convenience, and simplicity—alongside site selection, paths and lawns, formal versus naturalistic planting, kitchen-garden and orchard layout, water features, hardy herbaceous perennials, alpine, aquatic and bog plants, flowering trees and shrubs, and climbers. The author emphasizes learning from nature and personal gardening experience, warns against slavish use of stock plans, and advises tailoring designs to soil, aspect, shelter, and existing timber. Illustrations and plant lists support guidance on grouping, borders, terraces, walks, and maintenance, with cautions against undue complexity, excessive formality, and overuse of evergreens.

Turnbull & Spears, Printers, Edinburgh.

PREFACE.

The whole subject of Garden Design is so diverse and complicated that I must be pardoned for disclaiming any ideas of completeness for this small and unpretending book. To refer, however briefly, to the methods of different workers, and the varied effects obtained by them; or to present in detail the many phases of garden making as practised in England to-day, would necessitate not one volume, but several.

If the reader’s object in perusing these pages is to find a model or plan which he may slavishly duplicate in his own garden, he will, I am afraid, search in vain. Garden “design” is not of necessity formal, and suggestive though the name may be of set patterns and geometrical figures, more may be learnt concerning it in the woods and meadows of Nature than in all the musty volumes which line the shelves of the professional’s office. The pleasures of garden making are so real that each one should jealously guard for himself the privilege of being his own designer.

It is with the idea of helping the novice to help himself that I ask his acceptance of whatever may be of value to him in “The Book of Garden Design.”

C. T.

Woodbridge, Suffolk, May 1904.