Shrink Your Lawn: Design ideas for any landscape

By Evelyn J. Hadden

Get inspired to shrink your lawn with this illustrated collection of ideas from the Editor of the LessLawn website. Discover landscape elements that can serve your purpose as well as or better than a lawn. Explore ways to include new garden rooms. Convert your lawn into a functional garden that captures water, saves energy, and improves your quality of life. Get tips about which parts of your lawn to eliminate first. See examples of small and large lawnless gardens and gardens patterned after natural landscapes. Ideas for designing away your lawn include Rain Gardens, Boulevard Gardens, Stroll Gardens, Island Beds, Woodland Gardens, Herb Gardens, and many more. Start making plans to shrink your lawn today!

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1439217653
• ISBN13: 9781439217658
• Release Date: December 2008
• Publisher: BookSurge Publishing
• Length: 100 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.5" x 0.2" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Accessible, inspiring and important

In the interest of full disclosure, I was lucky enough to win a copy of this book. However, the ecological aspects of going lawn-free were already on my radar, and this book helped put words to my inchoate musings and better frame my explanation when friends, family and neighbours inquire about our lawn-free back garden. It's a activist's pamphlet, a call to action, an inspiration. Kudos to Evelyn Hadden!

Shrink Your Lawn is Lovely! :)

I found the pictures very helpful and the book to be full of ideas. They say, "a picture paints a thousand words". I did find plant names and suggestions on many pages, from pg. 22, 34, 36, 64, 68 and 69. I also read her first book titled, "Apprentice to a Garden", in which she lists an "Index", with an amazing amount of plant names and references. I was happy to see her 2nd book, full of photos. I highly recommend her first book, too. Thank you. LA

Versatile Author with Complementary Books

Readers of Shrink Your Lawn: Design Ideas for any Landscape will appreciate the author's earlier work, Apprentice to a Garden. It is hard to imagine such a versatile writer. The author's earlier work delved deeply into types of plants, with Latin genus and species names, and methods of deciding where to plant different characteristics of plants, with the aim of reducing the size of a lawn or wasted space. Her current book uses a completely different style that relies more on an incredible collection of pictures from various parts of the country to illustrate her suggestions. Accordingly, the reader must examine the pictures in detail to ascertain the sometimes subtle ideas being displayed. The two books complement each other beautifully.

A wonderful book for property owners to browse for ideas

Color photographs on virtually every page illustrate Shrink Your Lawn: Design Ideas For Any Landscape, a resource packed cover to cover with ideas for gardens that beautify and replace sections of one's lawn. From rain gardens to boulevard gardens, stroll gardens, herb gardens, and more, Shrink Your Lawn is filled cover to cover with tips, tricks, ideas, and instructions to beautify one's property. A wonderful book for property owners to browse for ideas. "Mowing the narrow strip of lawn adjacent to the alley or driveway is often work without reward. It is one of the best places to turn a negative into a positive and start shrinking your lawn... If you don't want to exchange the trouble of mowing for other chores like watering, use plants that need little care."