The front yard is the stepchild of landscape design, ignored in the current enthusiasm for gardening. Typically, with its high-maintenance lawn and overgrown foundation planting, the front yard doesn't enhance the house or provide useful living space for the homeowner. Yet as new properties become smaller and old ones grow shadier, the front garden may be the best place to grow vegetables or flowers, to sit outside in comfort and privacy, or even to swim or play tennis. Mary Riley Smith, a landscape designer who has often dealt with poorly planned and underused front properties, has filled this book with creative ways to make your own front garden beautiful and functional. She shows how to design paths, driveways, and parking areas and how to camouflage unattractive but necessary structures. For privacy, she describes the different virtues of fences, clipped hedges, and loose, flowing hedgerows. When it comes to planting in front of the house, the choices are surprising: instead of a lawn, you might create a colorful cottage garden, an edible landscape, a drought-tolerant meadow of regional native plants, a sea of ornamental grasses, or even a romantic orchard. All of these landscapes, and dozens more from all parts of the country, are illustrated with beautiful photographs. THE FRONT GARDEN concludes with nine case histories, including the landscape designers' plans, that will give you even more ideas for turning your front yard into a beautiful garden.

Illustrates how Edwardian houses were built, how they were used, and what they meant at the time.

Publisher description

A small garden presents special landscaping challenges. Glenn Morris, a landscape architect with extensive experience in creating imaginative and workable solutions to garden problems, will show you how to get the garden that is just right for you.--[book cover].

Gardening Your Front Yard is an active, inspiring resource that shows you how to treat your front yard like a backyard without sacrificing beauty, from choosing the right plants to building front patios and walkways. With her unique combination of DIY/building savvy and gardening expertise, author Tara Nolan (Raised Bed Revolution) weaves you past the main pitfalls you may encounter when trying to fit a garden or gardens between your home and the street. This beautiful and comprehensive book shows how to accomplish several hardscape projects, such as building front patios, borders, edging, and walkways, as well as making your own raised beds, planting containers, trellises, rose arbors, privacy screens, and more—all custom-designed for the rigors of front-yard gardening. Gardening Your Front Yard is a garden book in every sense of the word, however. Choosing the right plants is even more important when you are dealing with a small, highly visible area with less than ideal growing conditions—all common traits of most front yards. You will find advice on training vines up brickwork and planting around foundation walls, planting boulevards/hell strips, and you’ll even take a trip into the side yard. Shade gardens, privacy screening, and security dos and don'ts are covered, plus how to intermingle edibles and landscape plants, cactus and succulent gardens, birdbaths, and much, much more. With the sage advice and step-by-step projects of this comprehensive guide, convert your front yard from a bland grasscape to a vital living space.

'Brilliant and hilarious' GRAYSON PERRY 'Absolutely brilliant' JENNIFER SAUNDERS, THE TIMES 'A delightful read' SUNDAY TIMES 'An entertaining, clever book' TELEGRAPH The international bestseller and unofficial guidebook to the English national character by anthropologist Kate Fox. Have you ever been unable to explain the idiosyncrasies of English humour, bizarre mobile-phone etiquette, or the endless obsession with class? In this classic bestselling book, social anthropologist Kate Fox puts a nation under a microscope. The result is a biting, affectionate, insightful and often hilarious look at the English in all our glory. Based on extensive field-research, experiments and observations, Fox deciphers a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and bizarre codes of behaviour. She uncovers the roots of English self-mockery and demystifies peculiar cultural features such as 'weather-speak', class anxiety tests, the paranoid pantomime rule and the apology reflex. If you're English, this book will help you understand yourself and your fellow countrymen in a new way. And if you aren't English, you'll finally understand why we talk about the weather so much. A worldwide bestseller, translated into multiple languages, and a set text for university anthropology courses, Watching the English is a timeless classic on the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people.

The first profound depiction of the great reformer of Japanese garden design in the twentieth century Mirei Shigemori decisively shaped the development of Japanese landscape architecture in the twentieth century. He founded the Kyoto Garden Society in 1932 and published the 26-volume Illustrated Book on the History of the Japanese Garden in 1938. One year later he designed his own first masterwork, the garden of the main hall of Tôfuku-ji Temple. Between then and his death in 1975, he went on to design 240 gardens throughout Japan. Among the most famous are the Tenrai-an tea garden (1969) and the Matsuo Taisha garden (1975). All of his gardens are distinguished by the fact that they honor tradition while at the same time – through their openness to Western modernity – they free themselves from its weight and develop a language of their own. The first part of the book will deal with Shigemori’s life and influences, including his interest in ikebana and tea ceremonies. The second part will offer detailed presentations of some seventeen different gardens. Mirei Shigemori prägte maßgeblich die Entwicklung der japanischen Landschaftsarchitektur im 20. Jahrhundert. Seit den 1920er Jahren tätig, gründete er 1932 die Kyotoer Gartengesellschaft und publizierte 1938 das 26-bändige Werk Illustrated Book on the History of the Japanese Garden. Ein Jahr später entwarf er sein erstes eigenes Meisterwerk, den Garten bei der Haupthalle des Tôfuku-ji Tempels. Von da an gestaltete er 240 Gärten in ganz Japan bis zu seinem Tod 1975; zu den berühmtesten gehören der Teegarten Tenrai-an (1969) und der Matsuo Taisha-Garten (1975). Kennzeichen seiner Gärten ist, dass sie die Tradition ehren und sich zugleich – in der Öffnung gegenüber den Einflüssen der westlichen Moderne – von dem Althergebrachten durch eine eigene Sprache lösen. Der erste Teil des Buches wird sich mit dem Leben Shigemoris und den Einflüssen auf sein Werk auseinandersetzen. Dabei wird auch seine Auseinandersetzung mit Ikebana und Teezeremonien eine Rolle spielen. Der zweite Teil wird etwa 17 Gärten ausführlich darstellen.

In an era of increasingly patient-centered healthcare, understanding how health and illness play out in social context is vital. This volume opens a unique window on the role of play in health and wellbeing in widely varied contexts, from the work of Patch Adams as a hospital clown, to an Australian facility for dementia treatment, to a New Zealand preschool after an earthquake, to a housing complex where Irish children play near home. Across these and other featured studies, play is shown to be shaman-like in its transformative dynamics, marshaling symbolic resources to re-align how patients construe and experience illness. Even when illness is not an issue, play promotes wellbeing by its power to reimagine, invigorate, enliven and renew through sensory engagement, physical activity, and symbolism. Play levels social barriers and increases flexible response, facilitating both shared social support and creative reassessment. This book challenges assumptions that play is inefficient and unproductive, with highly relevant evidence that playful processes actually work hard to dislodge unproductive approaches and thereby aid resilience. Solid research evidence in this book charts the course and opens the agenda for taking play seriously, for the sake of health. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Play.

Although urban allotment gardening dates back to the nineteenth century, it has recently undergone a renaissance of interest and popularity. This is the result of greater concern over urban greenspace, food security and quality of life. This book presents a comprehensive, research-based overview of the various features, benefits and values associated with urban allotment gardening in Europe. The book is based on a European COST Action project, which brings together researchers and practitioners from all over Europe for the first detailed exploration of the subject on a continent-wide scale. It assesses the policy, planning and design aspects, as well as the social and ecological benefits of urban allotment gardening. Through an examination of the wide range of different traditions and practices across Europe, it brings together the most recent research to discuss the latest evolutions of urban allotment gardening and to help raise awareness and fill knowledge gaps. The book provides a multidisciplinary perspective, including insights from horticulture and soil science, ecology, sociology, urban geography, landscape, planning and design. The themes are underpinned by case studies from a number of European countries which supply a wide range of examples to illustrate different key issues.