Shady Retreats: 20 Plans for Colorful, Private Spaces in Your Backyard

By Barbara W. Ellis

Book Overview

Most flowers and vegetables love the sun, but the gardeners who tend them crave the shade. A comfortable hammock strung between two trees. A set of Adirondack chairs arranged for conversation beneath a vine-covered arbor. A stone bench tucked into a quiet nook. These out-of-the-way outdoor retreats provide busy gardeners with cool relief from the hot sun, as well as precious hours of quiet, privacy, and peace. In SHADY RETREATS, lifelong gardener Barbara W. Ellis provides detailed plans for 20 gardens with shade as the theme. Each design includes easy-to-read blueprints and a glorious oil painting of what the garden will look like. Ellis also provides specific plant lists; suggestions on how to bring color into the shade; and practical advice on how to use shrubs, trees, vines, and man-made structures to create attractive, inviting, shady sanctuaries in any garden or yard. The garden design concepts are easy for even novices to grasp, and experienced gardeners will appreciate the unique inspirations and down-to-earth advice on how to adapt the concept of the shady retreat to fit their own garden's configuration. Complete with suggestions on how to use gazebos, containers, fountains, and other garden ornaments, plus an encyclopedia of approximately 100 shade-loving plants, Shady Retreats is an easy-to-use handbook that helps even beginning gardeners make the move out of the house and into a cool, inviting outdoor sanctuary.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1580174728
• ISBN13: 9781580174725
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: Storey Books
• Length: 182 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.3" x 9.9"

Customer Reviews

Get away from it all!!

Very good book to inspire you to find a "retreat" in your own backyard to rest, read, or just dream. The pictures and ideas are very inviting. Great book to add to my collection.

Choices, choices, choices

I LOVE this book! So many designs to choose from. Great buy, gorgeous pictures.

A reward book for gardeners

Reward yourself for gardening. Most of the gardeners I know love to get their hands in the dirt and work at whatever it takes to make their garden beautiful. But there comes a time to sit back, either alone or with friends and family, and just enjoy what you have created. This book gives you plans for twenty shady retreats where you can sit back, relax and just enjoy.Each of the 20 retreats is shown in a painting by Gary Palmer (the idea of a painting rather than a photograph is a novel approach and it worked well with this topic) and a detailed design layout is provided too. I would have found it helpful if more construction details were included, but this is an idea book rather than a how-to book.The strength of this book lies in the recurring themes such "Colour in the Shade" and "Ideas for Great Design" that enrich each of the major designs. There are also ideas of plants to selct for each and a goodly list of favourite shade plants at the end of the book.The illustrations throughout the book are right on target with the theme and illustrate ways to incorporate your own requirements - peace? an active area? a working space? entertaining? - into a design for a shady retreat.Definitely a reward book. Every gardener deserves a shady retreat like these.