Gaining Ground: Dramatic Landscaping Solutions to Reclaim Lost Garden Spaces

by Maureen Gilmer

Book Overview

This guide offers design ideas that should translate well into any garden for every budget - even a postage-stamp backyard or terrace can become an urban oasis of water and colour. It includes before... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809227770
• ISBN13: 9780809227778
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Contemporary
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 3.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 9.1" x 11.3"

Customer Reviews

Fantastic Ideas!

I would highly recommend this book. It has great pictures and wonderful ideas. I see one person commented that the concepts were too broad; my feeling is, with any design book, these are ideas. No one buys a design book, takes it home and does exactly what is pictured. This book gets the creative juices flowing. Enjoy!

Classic re-do's

Michael Glassman's landscaping ideas, which are presented in this book, take their inspiration from very classical sources. There is nothing kitschy or trendy here, so if dramatic to you means 'funky' you should look to other sources. The designs show immense skill and judgment. The examples for seemingly hopeless spaces are a joy to behold, and the problem yards are both small and large. If you can't afford a landscape designer of Glassman's stature (and many of us can't) you will still enjoy reading the book many times over, and probably will find at least one or two ideas that you can adapt for your own yard.

High-end, but worth it

In northern California -- where we pay a fortune for a small plot of land -- we want to maximize every inch, regardless of the cost. I found "Gaining Ground" inspirational and extremely useful for maximizing my tiny little plot. The pictures are beautiful and the text does a good job describing the design and the use of the different objects in the design. These are not inexpensive gardens, but they are beautiful!

Stunning!

I could not believe the garden makeovers I saw in this book! It made me look at my own garden afresh and gave me a thousand and one ideas of what to do next. I read the book from cover to cover in a weekend.

A readable book

Gaining Ground is perhaps the first gardening book that I've actually read (as opposed to just looking at pretty pictures). Even though the photos illustrating what the author has accomplished are beautiful to the point of being daunting, the IDEAS are usuable even in my own scrawny patch. This book points out basic concepts that can help transform a garden. How one implements these concepts is up to the wallet, personal taste, and climate.