Gardening With Nature and Gardening With Water
By James Van Sweden, Watson Guptill

James Van Sweden and his partner Wolfgang Oehme are the founders of the New American Garden style which seeks to soften the line between nature and nurture in garden design. Starting in the late 1970s, Van Sweden and Oehme have created some of the premier gardens of the recent era, including a number of public gardens in Washington, D.C. and New York City.

Van Sweden is a landscape architect while Oehme contributes expertise in plants and horticulture. As you might imagine, they tend to work on a rather grand scale. Both Oehme and Van Sweden favor large plantings of single varieties to dramatic effect. Many of the elements they select are large to begin with, including grasses, trees, shrubs, water features and manmade structures. Perhaps most impressive is the way these elements are chosen to look gorgeous in all seasons, winter gardens being a specialty of theirs.

Both volumes of this series are filled with large color photographs, making a browse through either book an inspirational treat. Although most of us aren't invited to design gardens for Rockefeller Park or Pennsylvania Avenue, we can learn a lot from studying these gardens. (Not all the gardens pictured are public -- many are on private estates throughout the eastern United States.)

In Gardening With Nature, Van Sweden introduces the New American Garden style, and takes us on a tour of gardens that exemplify it. Says Van Sweden, the goal is to "create a garden that is in harmony with nature, regardless of size." To that end, he provides readers with his own elements of garden design, numerous lushly illustrated case studies with plans, as well as a step-by-step guide to creating your own natural garden. Oehme contributes a chapter devoted to his favorite plants, including a good selection of grasses.

Gardening With Water is enough to make anyone want to build a water feature immediately. There are small, private fountains and large reflecting pools, gardens that take advantage of existing water such as streams and oceans, and gardens with pools. As with Gardening With Nature, the case studies are the core of the book. Several chapters at the end introduce nuts and bolts, including an outline of how to build a manmade water feature and a guide to plant selection. The text, while brief, is practical and thought-provoking, especially for water gardeners who are just getting their feet wet, so to speak.

These books are primarily for gardeners with large spaces but anyone who loves gardening will learn from and enjoy them. The principles of natural harmony and proportion work with any size garden. Professional gardeners especially will benefit from such an in-depth treatment of these master gardeners' work.