Garden designer Bill Noble starts his new book with this promise, "I'm going to tell you a story of the pleasures and challenges, both aesthetic and practical, of creating a garden that feels genuinely rooted to its place."
His book, called “Spirit of Place,” profiles the making of his own garden in New England, but at the same time teaches us to take contextual cues from where we are gardening, along with other guiding principles of good garden design for any place—like how to create distinct outdoor spaces and also a sense of privacy, something that we all struggle with in gardens large or small.
Bill Noble is the former Director of Preservation for the Garden Conservancy, and has worked with individual homeowners and public and private organizations to create, restore and preserve gardens for many years. In our conversation, he offered some garden design wisdom as we talked about “Spirit of Place.”
Invasives and Conservation: Sometimes when weeding in my own garden, I get a sense of overwhelm, a feeling that the unwanted plants are winning....
Once upon a time the seed catalogs came out around the start of the New Year, but these days the very first ones may...
Maybe you can feel it where you garden, too. A slight shift in the weather, which combined with shortening days, means summer is loosening...