Spring has sprung—and so has a bounty of new books celebrating the beauty of the natural world. Whether you’re an armchair gardener who dreams of a romantic cutting garden or someone who likes to get your hands dirty cultivating your own arcadia, these new books will inspire all types of encounters with natural beauty.
Glorious Gardens: Private Edens of the World’s Leading Interior Designers
by Dara Caponigro
If you’ve ever wondered if your favorite designers have gardens as beautiful as their homes, here is your answer, in a glorious, oversized, lavishly photographed volume. From Martyn Lawrence Bullard’s Moroccan-inspired idyll in the Hollywood Hills and Veere Grenney’s slice of paradise by the sea in Tangiers to Katie Ridder’s painterly approach to perennials in Millbrook and Timothy Whealon’s elegant aerie above Gramercy Park, this book shows how a designer’s eye for color, structure, and texture comes alive in the garden.
$75, Monacelli
Roses in the Garden by Ngoc Minh Ngo
This beautiful volume could be called “Romancing the Rose.” Not so much a gardening how-to book, it’s more a how-to-look book. Acclaimed photographer and author Ngoc Minh Ngo explores 11 enchanting gardens around the world in a celebration of roses across centuries of culture and history, from the dreamscape of Italian ruins at Ninfa to the Kusabue-no-oka rosarium in Sakura, Japan. A helpful photographic index of roses will have you making lists of roses to try in your own garden.
$35, Artisan
Frances Palmer: Life with Flowers
by Frances Palmer
This delightful flower book is told from the perspective of an artist. Ceramicist Frances Palmer has been making vases for decades and began growing flowers in order to photograph them in her vessels. Over time she has become as much gardener as potter. She shares the flowers she grows throughout the year with tips for both cultivating and arranging, interspersed with delicious tidbits on photography, recipes, art projects, and more. Palmer’s captivating pictures and bouquets will inspire your efforts indoors and out.
$65, barnesandnoble.com
Aerin Lauder: Living with Flowers by Aerin Lauder
Style icon Aerin Lauder has nurtured a lifelong love of flowers in all their facets—curating their fragrances in perfumes, arranging them for entertaining, growing them in her gardens, and being surrounded by their beauty in floral fabric, wallpaper, art, and more. In this lush book, she makes a compelling case for enjoying—and displaying—floral arrangements every day, not just on special occasions.
$60, Rizzoli
Emily Thompson Flowers by Emily Thompson
You know you’re not encountering a typical flower book—or florist—when you read the table of contents of Emily Thompson’s first book with headings such as Thickets, Cascades, Vapor, and Gusts and Gales. Thompson trained as an artist and sculptor before making flora and foliage her medium, and her wildly inventive, otherworldly creations use every part of the plant from root to thorn. Consider this the monograph of an experimental artist rather than a flower-arranging manual, but one that will teach you to look at the natural world in new ways.
$65, Monacelli
The New Romantic Garden by Jo Thompson
If English country gardens are more your style, British garden expert Jo Thompson’s book is for you, though she shares 30 wide-ranging projects that never define that style in singular fashion. Thompson both shows and tells about inventively designed and planted gardens in a wide range of locales, throughout all the seasons, from an abundant wildflower meadow to a city penthouse terrace to a Victorian walled garden, each one as intriguing as the next.
$50, Rizzoli
Flower Couture: From My Garden to My House by Cordelia de Castellane
For a charming jaunt to the French countryside, delve into this scrapbook-like exploration of Dior Maison artistic director Cordelia de Castallane’s home and gardens in Oise, north of Paris. Loosely organized by color, the book mixes illustrations, photos, and patterned borders in whimsical fashion, with lots of inspiration along the way.
$50, Rizzoli
Martha Stewart’s Gardening Handbook by Martha Stewart
The guru of home and garden offers a comprehensive guide, from planning to planting to troubleshooting, for flowers, vegetables and herbs, bushes, trees, and more in this 368-page tome. An ideal reference volume or gift for novice and experienced gardeners alike.
$40, Harvest
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