"Your house is the center of your garden" is the first sentence and central tenet of the garden design book that I just finished. _Your House, Your Garden_ by Gordon Hayward was well worth the 26 clams or so from Amazon. Despite its northeast US focus on plant materials, the book was well worth the time and money for the design insight alone. Hayward illustrates practical design guidelines and principles throughout the book with a series of wonderful photographs and watercolors and goes far beyond the usual aesthetic notions that other design books end with.
I put one of his design principles into action today when I demolished a low brick planter that was sited directly across from my kitchen doors and which has impeded foot traffic for years.
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The Creative Homeowner edition of _Trellises and Arbors_ starts off chapter one with wonderful photographs of trellises and arbors, but the accompanying captions leave a lot to be desired. "Stand alone trellises provide a base for climbing plants such as clemantis" and "Choose plants that are best suited for the size and type of trellis that you install" and "Materials choices for arbors range from solid wood to metal to bent twigs (next to pictures of all three)" are next to useless. A picture would seem to be worth 10,000 words to Creative Homeowner publications since chestnuts like these lard the text in the first chapter. On the plus side, later chapters appear to offer practical (and well-photographed) instructions for building trellises, so at the used book price from Amazon I consider this a good deal.
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