Book Review: Refresh Your Garden Design With Color, Texture & Form

Refresh Your Garden Design With Color, Texture & Form
by Rebecca Sweet

160 pages, softcover
Horticulture Books, 2013
List price: $19.99

Author and garden designer Rebecca Sweet has been sharing her expertise on the pages of Horticulture magazine for a couple of years now, so it was just a matter of time before a compilation of her artistic talents made its way to the book shelf proper. Refresh Your Garden Design is actually the second book that Sweet has authored, following 2011's Garden Up! with fellow Californian, Susan Morrison.

This time, we get some lessons on the finer details of garden design - so many, in fact, that I wonder if Rebecca is giving away all her secrets. Of course, even if she is, the design-challenged among us don't mind. And it's one thing to read about it and yet another to learn the lessons and adapt them to your own garden.

Refresh Your Garden Design is not a book to be read in a day or even a week, although you could. This book delivers an incredible amount of useful content. In fact, as I read it, I felt the urge to take a highlighter to some of the ideas presented.

There are no full garden designs depicted here, but gardeners will find that this will be a go-to book whenever they're in the mood to improve the aesthetics of their gardens. It has more than enough information to help choose elements when starting from scratch as well as giving some fresh ideas when it's time to change things up.

Rebecca Sweet is a garden designer and owner of the design firm Harmony in the Garden, located in Northern California. In addition to designing gardens, Rebecca is co-author of the best-selling Garden Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces (Cool Springs Press, 2011). You can read Rebecca's ideas on garden design in her column, "Harmony in the Garden," in Horticulture magazine and on her blog, Gossip in the Garden.

Read more garden book reviews.
Read Kylee Baumle’s blog, Our Little Acre.