Editor Reviews:

Product Description:

What makes a garden authentic? For American gardeners, this question can be vexing. Because America is a comparatively young nation, it hasn't had much time to develop an indigenous garden style. Gardeners have tended to turn to other national traditions—such as Italy's, Japan's, or England's—for inspiration. The unhappy result of this piecemeal stylistic borrowing has been the creation of gardens that bear no relationship to local landscapes and history, and that have no connection with our daily lives.

Clair Sawyers shows this tendency can be reversed: how we can create gardens that are both deeply rooted in their surroundings and deeply satisfying to their creators and owners. Drawing on her knowledge of a vast array of American and foreign gardens, she identifies five principles that help instill a sense of authenticity: capture the sense of place, derive beauty from function, use humble or indigenous materials, marry the inside to the outside, and involve the visitor.

Practical and inspiring, The Authentic Garden will enable the reader to make a garden that is true to a specific time, place, and culture; to capture and reflect an authentic spirit so that the garden, in turn, will nurture the spirit of those who cherish and dwell in it.

Rating : - Good, but a bit disappointing
This is a nice book. The five "principles" are smart and sensible (if not brilliantly original), the photos are apt and attractive and the writing is clear (if humorless). But in illustrating each of her principles the author resorts to the approach taken by so many other gardening books -- an interesting driveway here, a creative clothesline there. And the tone is often annoyingly cranky, picking on current whipping boys like green meatballs and chain-store-bought marigolds. And one could nitpick. The author counsels the use of natives two pages after a lovely photograph of the Scott Arboretum (of which she's the director) that features an interesting assemblage of phormiums, elephant ears and other exotics. In one of her examples of using humble materials - the pebble garden at Dumbarton Oaks - she notes that that great estate was designed by Beatrix Farrand but fails to mention that Farrand didn't design the pebble garden and probably hated it. And dwelling on the two Taliesins and Fallingwater to explain how to figure out the "genius loci" of the reader's half acre suburban plot just isn't helpful. The book just doesn't seem to me to merit all those "five star" reviews. It certainly won't change my gardening life the way, say, Julie Moir Messervy's "The Inward Garden" did.