Your Rad Garden: Freedom, Purpose, and Meaning in Your Backyard

By Mary Adelaide Scipioni

Create a rad garden that reflects your personal lifestyle!

This book is for independent thinkers who love beauty and nature and want to enhance their outdoor living experience. 

You’ll discover that architectural function, beauty, and sustainability can all be achieved together. “Your Rad Garden” will help you to trust your instincts and build your confidence. The author is a landscape architect who has over 30 years of design experience gained in New York, New England, and Italy. She has taught landscape design at a number of universities, served on community boards, and spoken at design conferences. She currently owns Pebble-stream, a boutique landscape architectural consultancy in the beautiful Finger Lakes Region of New York. “Your Rad Garden” is the perfect companion to your landscape design sourcebooks with their “dream garden” images. It is for everyone who wants to tackle garden design, whether on their own or by teaming with a professional. It is a “why,” more than a “how to” book. This short read will open your mind to a deeper vision of landscapes designed for living with nature. Here’s to creating a rad garden teeming with life!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Apr 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781982996154

Book preview

Scipioni

Table of Contents

Your Rad Garden

Table of Contents

Introduction

Growing your confidence

Gardens are disturbing

The minimalist garden

The landscapes we like

What’s your culture?

The siting of your house

Water goes downhill

Your garden rooms

Plants as architecture

A tree is part of a forest

Plant communities

Water features

Lawns: the good, the bad, and the ugly

How messy can you get?

Getting comfortable

Habitat, for people too

Artful space and form

Material world

More information

In the garden, every step we take,

even if a baby step,

should be in the direction of beauty.

Mariuccia Milla, Italian author and garden connoisseur.

Rad means radical, of course.

Because it’s radical to think for yourself, which is what this guide proposes.

Introduction

This book is about garden design. It is neither a technical manual nor a coffee-table portfolio of garden porn. It offers some concepts, approaches, and trends that drive landscape design for your consideration, so that you can be more confident in your ability to create the intimate outdoor spaces that support your lifestyle.

You might be looking out the window at your neighbor’s yard right now, lusting after their weed-free Kentucky Bluegrass lawn, or calculating how much they spent on their walkway and their ornamental shrubs. Well, those days are over. By understanding your landscape preferences and considering other options that are based more on performance and the experience of nature, you’ll be equipped to make better choices.

Better doesn’t mean right according to my standards. It means closer to what you really want. Ideas come from understanding, and art from control. My goal is for you to gain confidence in your own judgment and taste, a natural consequence of knowing how design decisions are made.

Based on the evidence all around us, I believe that is rad.

One note: in this book, I will use the terms landscape and garden somewhat interchangeably.

Growing your confidence

I used to live in Italy, and one thing that really struck me about Italians (who are particularly good at aesthetics) is that everyone has an opinion about beauty, and to each of them, that is the truth. They don’t say in my opinion. They say, This is beautiful or, That is ugly. Now, they have the advantage of being surrounded by beauty: architecture, art, their rich landscape, the Mediterranean Sea, etc.

Confidence is important in any artistic or experimental endeavor. Garden design is an art, but there is also science to it, and that is the experimental part. You need to trust yourself. Think about what you want and focus on the big picture. If your goal is to create a magical place teeming with life and laughter, then focus on how to get that, rather than making assumptions about whether you need a patio or a tree. That means you need to direct your attention to the people who will be enjoying the garden, and what they will do there. Then, your design should be directed to making the landscape as accommodating as possible.

When designing a garden, you also need to consider who is going to maintain it, and how much time or money that will entail. For some people, landscape care is an enjoyable hobby; for others it is grueling work, plain and simple. Try to understand your own level of commitment.

Nothing teaches confidence better than familiarity. If you spend a lot of time outdoors in parks, on trails, at a lake, in the mountains, or at the sea, then you probably have a good idea of the type of experience you like, and the settings that appeal to you most. It’s true that you may not have the scale in your backyard to replicate such places, but it’s possible to reproduce some of their character.

First, you need to get outside of the box that you’re in. Don’t spend time, energy, and money on something that you think you should do because everybody else does it. Be radical: follow your instincts and your heart.

My challenge as a landscape architect is that gardens are a moving target. Change is constant: things grow, flower, and die. Weather patterns are predictably unpredictable, and plant selections may require modifications over time. Property changes hands and people have different tastes. The