Sun-Drenched Gardens: The Mediterranean Style [Anglais] [Relié]

Imagine journeying to the Mediterranean region, with the scent of crushed thyme underfoot, the silhouettes of Italian cypress trees towering against an azure sky, and structures like rose-draped arbors and stone pavilions providing respite from the afternoon sun. As a style of gardening, Mediterranean landscaping is more popular and widely emulated than ever. By way of illustrating the desirable features associated with the sun-drenched gardenscape, Smithen and Lewis focus on 25 exemplary settings in California, the South of France, Italy, and Spain. Along with widely photographed garden estates of great repute, images of less grand private homes should suggest design ideas for do-it-yourself types. This is a marvelous sourcebook of possibilities for hardscaping, ornamentation, and planting schemes that readers can share with their professional designers or that they themselves can use to create or enhance their gardens. With Smithen's narration and Lewis' sublime photographs, garden lovers can look forward to enjoying a conceptual journey where the light is piercing and fragrance hangs heavy on the air. Alice Joyce
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The Mediterranean climate, with its mild, rainy winters and hot, dry summers, gave rise to a gardening style that is very much in vogue today. Not only do Mediterranean-style gardens offer gorgeous, fragrant, soothing sanctuaries that are wonderfully easy to maintain, but water-saving planting is environmentally sound and enormously appealing whatever one's region or climatic zone. This lush, seductive volume showcases the distinctive beauty of some 25 gardens in France, Italy, Spain, and California that employ drought-tolerant plants such as agaves and other succulents, wisteria, lavenders, geraniums, and even some roses-and design features such as terraces, arbors, hedges, pergolas, topiary, statuary, decorative tile, and terra-cotta containers-that are hallmarks of the sun-drenched garden aesthetic.

Lucinda Lewis's 200 color photographs, made especially for this book, take the reader through a variety of private and public gardens, some grand and some intimate, while extended captions provide the practical information that gardeners want to know, as well as design ideas that will help them create their own place of escape or enchantment.

Lucinda Lewis is a professional photographer based in Los Angeles. Her books include Abrams' Roadside America. Jan Smithen teaches the art and science of gardening at the Los Angeles County Arboretum. She has led garden tours to England, Italy, and France.