Review: Garden Renovation: Transform Your Yard Into the Garden of Your Dreams

Garden Renovation: Transform Your Yard Into the Garden of Your Dreams by Bobbie Schwartz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I received an Advance Reader's Copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

This is an extremely useful book for anyone interested in renovating or freshening up their landscape. While it assumes a certain amount of garden experience on the part of the reader looking to do it on their own, it is largely a book of ideas meaning that anyone, with any level of garden and landscape experience, could take to a professional landscape designer and say "I like this idea."

The most valuable advice that Schwartz offers the reader is to really study your property, across seasons (most of all summer, but really all, if you want an all-season garden, and to study light and shade patterns throughout the days and the seasons. You have to know what you are dealing with- wet, dry, full sun, part shade, before you can meaningfully design anything new. She recommends waiting a full year, if possible. This also allows you time to decide where you are spending time outside, and if you aren't, where you might like to.

Offering advice about visuals and creating "inviting" spaces, Schwartz also tackles the practical stuff about pests like deer, moles, voles, geese (yes, geese can be a pest and if you don't know that, you've never spent time around geese), raccoons and various others, and how and why to create barriers, walls, and fences. She gives advice on how to make paths and walls that harmonize with your house's architecture, and how to design pleasant and eye-catching sheds that will keep all those gardening tools and the potting bench out of your garage. One of the things I especially liked was that Schwartz is absolutely unafraid to tell you to take down trees that were badly placed and do not work for your yard. Take them out, she says, and plant better and wiser. The little ecosystem in your yard will thank you.

All in all, a useful and easy-to-follow book that gives you tools to start planning your landscape redesign.

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