The Art & Practice of Gardening / Penelope Hobhouse

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Product Description ------------------- Penelope Hobhouse is a garden writer, garden designer, garden historian, lecturer and gardener. In 1996 she hosted the Art and Practice of Gardening (with Perennial Productions) for House and Garden Television in the United States. Titles included in this collector's edition are: Roses for the Garden, Visions of Nature, Structural Elements, the Summer Garden, Nurseries & Collections, Flower Gardens, Color in the Garden, the Useful Garden, the Smaller Garden, the Country Garden, Design Basics, and ing the s of a Garden. Review ------ When thinking about your garden, says British horticulturist Penelope Hobhouse at the end of her video series The Art & Practice of Gardening, treat design principles like grammar. Learn it, forget it, and do your own thing. And your garden will work. In 13 visits to gardens in England, Ireland and America, Ms. Hobhouse reviews such topics as learning from nature, growing roses, combining flowers for effect and particularly creating structural features. She emphasizes the s of a garden; the placement of trees, hedges, topiaries, arbors, stones and steps as architectural elements around which the rest of the garden should be planned. She is certain that there is a right way and a wrong way in garden designing. At the top of her list of right ways is Henry David Thoreau's advice, simplify, simplify. Ms. Hobhouse tours such famed places as David Austin's rose garden and the late Rosemary Verey's Barnsley House. In America she walks with Thomas Buchter to savor the month of March in the Winterthur Gardens, Thomas Buchter to savor the month of March in the Winterthur Gardens, which is undergoing restoration in Pennsylvania. There she is introduced to the torch azalea (Rhododendron kaempferi), an unusual tall shrub adding exquisite texture to an azalea display. The Art & Practice of Gardening, which runs 273 minutes and was produced as a home and gardening television series, is a vivid celebration of gardening more than a how-to guide. Very large grounds are emphasized, including grand avenues framed by trees. Even the episode titled The Smaller Garden features a large landscape divided into compartments with design elements sometimes repeating those from other sections. Ms. Hobhouse maintains, however, that the patterns defining large gardens can be adapted to small spaces. The private and public settings are gorgeous, worth a viewer's visit. And Ms. Hobhouse's expert advice on design such as the use of grasses to convey movement in a small space might just make the difference between having a ho-hum back yard or a garden which, in Ms. Verey's quaint phrasing, curtsies to the house. --Bill Scheick, Dallas Morning News, April 2008