For the tactile among us, gardening can be the perfect way to direct weekend energies—and the best place to get inspired about plants, lawn patterns, and pruning is in the pages of a lush gardening book. Book your coziest couch for a few hours of leisurely reading this weekend, ready our favorite mugs and fuzziest slippers. AD has compiled a list of beloved gardening books from four designers we love. Read on, pick out a few that entice you, and settle in for the dreamiest of garden reads.
“My favorite gardening book is the one I’m still waiting for on Deborah Nevins,” says interior designer David Netto, making a not-so-subtle plea to any writers and publishers out there considering coverage of her work, “But the book that blows my mind and which I really do look at constantly—really use—is [on] Jacques Wirtz” (an old paperback focused on the Belgian landscape gardener’s work that his team keeps in their design library). Another of his favorites is not technically a book at all: the visitors guide to Wethersfield, the country estate of Chauncey Stillman in upstate New York. “That is a great garden,” he says, “and very underrated.”
Tricia Foley, a designer and stylist who chronicled the restoration of her house and grounds on Long Island in a book of her own last year, listed ten favorite gardening books in total. Four of them are novels, such as…
