The new book Glorious Gardens by Dara Caponigro, the editor in chief of Frederic Magazine, features a particular type of garden. Each of the 21 gardens in the book belongs to a prominent interior designer—and it shows. The gardens are composed with the same precision and care as the perfectly tailored rooms these designers create in their professional life. They are all impossibly beautiful, clearly the work of trained professional aesthetes (often in collaboration with landscape designer peers).
Caponigro says a garden book was a natural choice for Frederic’s next book (they have published two interior design books) because the magazine often features gardens, but she says it’s also the natural progression that anyone who has taken an interest in interior design is bound to eventually turn their eye outdoors next.
Glorious Gardens shows just how elegantly an interior aesthetic can translate into garden style. “There’s a huge consistency between the way the gardens look and the interiors that these people create,” Caponigro explains. “Interior designers treat their gardens like an extension of the house.” Here are six lessons we gleaned from Glorious Gardens:
1. Lay out a garden like a home.
A theme that emerges from the book is the importance of garden “rooms.” Many of the designers use hedges or walls to create the feeling of a room within the outdoors. “Defining rooms makes a large piece of property much more manageable,” explains Caponigro. For example, Katie Ridder has a walled flower garden immediately outside the house, then you walk out to a pond, and then beyond a cutting garden. “All these areas are almost like the rooms of houses,” says Caponigro.
2. The garden should match the place.
Interior designers don’t decorate in a vacuum, so they also know you need to pay attention to the architecture of the house when designing a garden. The gardens of interior designers in Glorious Gardens are all sympathetic to the houses they surround and the landscape at large.
3. Aim for legibility.
Flipping through the pages of Glorious Gardens, one can’t help but notice interior designers’ strong preference for clipped boxwood and neatly-shorn hedges. Caponigro sees this as designers creating the same kind of strong legibility you would find in an interior—and just like a home needs places for the eye to rest, a garden needs those moments of visual clarity.
4. Decorate your garden!
“Exterior ornamentation is important to interior designers,” notes Caponigro, and looking through the book, you’ll spot many garden ornaments: tuteurs, obelisks, and picturesque gates. These not only add extra interest and beauty to the garden, they punctuate the space, as a place for the eye to focus.
5. Consider the view—from the inside.
All gardeners want their gardens to be beautiful, but interior designers are more precise, composing their gardens with specific vantage points in mind. For example, for his estate in Bedford, New York, Stephen Sills designs his plantings from the indoors out. “Every window in both houses looks onto a composed garden still life,” Caponigro writes.
6. Practice patience, and cede control.
One of the lessons that the interior designers have learned through gardening is patience. “The designers in this book are used to directing what something should look like, but a lot of them speak to this idea that you can’t really totally control nature. They’ve come to terms with it and found beauty in it.”
See also:
- Lessons Learned From ‘Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home’
- Required Reading: ‘The Modern Garden’ Delves Into Mid-Century Landscape Architecture
- Required Reading: ‘Visionary’ by Clare Takacs with Giacomo Guzzon
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