Design-Your-Garden Toolkit

Visualize the Perfect Plant Combinations for Your Yard; Step-by-Step Guide with Profiles of 128 Popular Plants, Reusable Cling Stickers, and Fold-Out Design Board
by Michelle Gervais

Before picking up the trowel, pick up the stickers! With 150 reusable illustrated stickers — representing dozens of plant cultivars that are versatile, readily available, and suitable for most temperate growing zones — plus a fold-out design board and a book teaching five easy steps of garden design, you’ll have everything you need to create your vision of the perfect garden. The durable cling stickers, with beautiful botanically accurate illustrations, can be layered, arranged, and rearranged to try out every variation before making any plant purchases. This book-and-kit combination makes it possible to create your dream border, bed, or backyard oasis without leaving your kitchen table!
 

From the Inside Flap

If you can recognize a well-designed garden but need some basic skills to start building your own garden beds in interesting and beautiful ways, here's the tool you need to get started. Read up on the fundamentals of good garden design (it's not as hard as you might think), learn a simple method for creating your own design, and brows a selection of 78 reliable plants that you can find in almost any good garden center in a temperate climate. Sure, you might find newer varieties out there, but these are classics. There are a few shrubs, lots of perennials, and a handful of plants that won't be hardy in most gardens but are worth the effort to bring indoors each winter or worth the money to buy new each spring.

Once you've studied the basics of combining plants and browsed through the possibilities, use the stickers and the fold-out design board to create the garden(s) of your dreams. We've included different cultivars for a number of plants and multiples of many of the stickers, because sometimes you need more than one. The design board has a grid on one side and an empty garden plot on the other, to suit your working style. The stickers are proportional to each other, based on the final growth habit, but do keep in mind that plants grow! You'll need to take that into account when you actually start digging.

Book details

Price: $19.95       Size: 8.0 x 10.0       Pages: 80       Format: Paperback       ISBN: 9781612129228
 

Product images

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Press Mentions

Parade - March 12 is National Plant a Flower Day: The Floral Finds You Can't Live Without

Publishers Weekly - Our Homes, Ourselves: Home & Garden Books 2018

UpCountry Magazine - How Does Your Garden Grow?

pegplant.com - New Books: 2018

atwistedgardener.blogspot.com - book review

News Times - Visualize before planting with new garden book

Reviews, Testimonials, and Comments

“A comprehensive and fun resource for gardeners of all levels of expertise! The easy-to-comprehend design concepts along with pages and pages of gorgeous — and incredibly realistic — stickers are sure to make this a favorite gardening tool.”
— Rebecca Sweet, landscape designer and author of 'Refresh Your Garden Design with Color, Texture and Form'

“Where has this book been all my life? Learning garden design with reusable ‘stickers’ is fun and confidence-boosting, and it reminds me of the Colorforms I played with as a kid.” 
— Amanda Thomsen, author of 'Kiss My Aster'

"I got the book yesterday and was very happy to find out I can read it without my glasses. Lol... The stickers are a great tool and the information about design is comprehensive and easy to apply. This horticulturist loves it...It's a nice tool for those beginning in the industry because you can have a visual idea [of] how the garden will look..."
— Carla C., New Milford Garden Club 

I have been reading "Design Your Garden Toolkit" by Michelle Gervais this first day of spring. Oh, what fun I am having using the color form plants to design my garden!! I heartily recommend this book to anyone who has worked hard on a garden, only to have it miss the look you were going for. LOVE IT!!
— Susan G., New Milfordite Facebook group

"A perfect guide for the beginning gardener. I highly recommend for anyone who wants to make their flower beds fabulous!"
Aubrey K., reviewer, netgalley.com