Michelle Slatalla - Gardenista: The Definitive Guide to Stylish Outdoor Spaces

The Gardenista Manifesto:
Ten Rules to Live By

(And Why They Work)

A Users Guide to Garden Palettes

Eight Creative Ways to Get More From Your Garden

Landscape and Garden Design

Introduction It started with a phone call. I have a terrible mint problem, my friend Julie Carlson confided. Can you come take a look? Wed known each other for a while: We lived in the same small town in Northern California, our daughters went to school together, I wrote a column for the New York Times, and she edited Remodelista. I was used to making house calls.

Im on my way over, I said.

The diagnosis was clear: runaway mint. It was merrily growing between the bricks on her terrace. Thats not where I want it, Julie said. She had planted it in a raised bed at least 2 feet away. But the next spring, as if it had taken a bus or something, the herb was sunning itself on the bricks. Pull it from the cracks and pour boiling water on the roots, I said. Right away.

Julie made me a cup of mint tea from the deceased and served it up with a big idea. For several years, she and the group of her friends who created Remodelista had been focused on interior design. What if we created a sister site, an online sourcebook to offer guidance on every aspect of exterior design, from landscaping and hardscape materials to outdoor lighting fixtures and the perfect paint color for your front door?

Thus was born Gardenista. For the past four years, weve spent most of our waking hours sleuthing out the best projects, products, and design ideas; we can help you choose the right Japanese pruning shears, fragrant old French roses, and midcentury house numbers.

We believe gardens matter. So does your patio, your porch, your front stoop, or the sunny windowsill outside your apartment window. The proof is everywhere: treating the outdoors as a natural extension of living space makes you happier. Whether your patch of green is perched on a balcony or sprawled across five acres, its your landscape to personalize.

And thats the challenge. How do you design an outdoor space, from hardscape to plants? How do you find the best last-a-lifetime tools? And where can you source everything you need to furnish your outdoor sanctuary?

This book answers those questions. It is a version of Gardenista you can dog-ear. To collect our favorite projectsfrom a secret seaside retreat on Cape Cod to an antiquarians cottage garden in London (complete with church spire)we traveled around the United States and Europe with the talented photographer Matthew Williams. He captured everything from sweeping views of town house backyards to close-ups of the details that imbue a garden with an unmistakable personality. Use this manual as a go-to resource, whether you want to re-create a planting scheme, choose outdoor furnishings, or install a stylish drainage system (not an oxymoron).

With Gardenista, its our mission to demystify garden design, whether youre planning a complete landscape overhaul or just hoping to corral your renegade mint. It doesnt matter if youre a neophyte or a master gardener: you can do this.

Outdoor space is living space, and should be as carefully considered as any other room in your home.

Curb appeal counts. The experience visitors have as they walk up to your front door makes them feel at home.

Spend on permanence. Investing in quality hardscape materials gives your garden good bones.

Plant for the garden you will have five years from now: sow seeds, buy small pots, and trade cuttings. Your patience will save you lots of money in the long run.

A hedge makes a better neighbor than a fence.

Buy beautiful tools and you will enjoy using them for a lifetime.

Make the garden part of your daily routine by planting something you can eat for dinner (parsley counts).

A dash of color, whether from paint or plants, sets the mood for an outdoor space.

The view from your bedroom window should include something that blooms every spring.

Choose personality over perfection; a little wildness in the garden is a good thing.

Come through the gate with us to explore thirteen of our favorite gardens of all sizes (in the city, the country, and suburbia), designed by their owners to erase boundaries between life outdoors and in. Well reveal their design secrets and give you tips on how to use their ideas in your own landscape.

After my husband, Josh Quittner, and I bought our Spanish Revival bungalow, we resurrected a previous owners garden and added modern elements, including a colorful perennials bed inspired by the planting scheme of New York Citys High Line Park.

My husband and I planted a fast-growing hedge of Pittosporum tenuifolium Silver Sheen to provide more privacy than our old picket fence; the small-leafed shrub is dense enough to persuade our papillons, Sticky (at left) and Larry, not to try to escape.

The garden was a mystery when my husband and I first saw the house seven years ago. It looked like something from a particularly grim Grimms fairy tale: overgrown vines, thorns, the poison sisters (ivy, oak, and sumac), and a threatening teaberry tree that once jumped in front of our car and ripped off the side mirror while I happened to be driving. The real estate agent claimed a previous owner had been a gardener. Was she talking about an owner from the nineteenth century, my husband wondered?

This was not a challenge I could pass up. A gardener all my life (theres some talk of how the surname Slatalla was an Ellis Island garbling of a word that means lettuce farmer in Polish), I suspected this was a garden worth restoring. The tricky part would be to figure out how to revive the best of the past while creating a modern garden.

Soon after we bought the house, I became the editor of Gardenista, which was a lucky thing for my garden in progress. As I started to make over the garden, I also was thinking about gardens all day at work. I became obsessed with Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolfs painterly landscapes and wanted to create a bold gesture of color to greet visitors.

When we cleared the brush in the front garden, we discovered a charming series of winding paths. Suddenly I could see the gardens structure.