Some garden books encourage readers to pick up the trowel and get down in the dirt. The titles presented here are more fanciful, designed for gift giving and coffee-table perusing.
100 Japanese Gardens
Stephen Mansfield. Tuttle, Mar.
Is it a garden book? A travel guide? Pure eye candy? This visual romp across Japan, which explores some of its most serene and green spaces and includes addresses, visiting hours, and other practical details for each, is all of the above. Locales include the grounds at Shisendo (a 17th-century Kyoto hermitage) and Tokyo’s Nezu Shrine, site of the Bunkyo Azalea Festival.
The Art of Outdoor Living
Scott Shrader. Rizzoli, Mar.
California landscape designer Shrader presents outdoor spaces in his home state, including his own, as lushly verdant rooms where meals, entertaining, and general lounging are all the more luxuriant under ivy and boughs. The book taps into an aspiration, says Rizzoli publisher Charles Miers, to “take down the wall between garden and house.”
Blooms
Phaidon, Apr.
This extensive sourcebook highlights 86 contemporary floral designers and their vibrant creations and celebrates them as true “creative practitioners,” says Victoria Clarke, who edited the title. “Certain types of blooms are being used that were once considered out of fashion, with clashing color palettes and varied groups of them working together.” The book also nods to an emerging trend in floral design, she says, in which almost anything goes—examples include an orchid still life with artfully desiccated citrus, or cheerful blossoms springing from gold platform sneakers. Above all, Clarke says of the book, “It’s flower porn.”
Garden Wild
Andre Baranowski. Rizzoli, Mar.
Veteran garden photographer Baranowski’s images of landscaped environments that mimic fields, forests, prairies, and other wild spaces in modern American gardens are meant, he writes in the introduction, to “appeal to your emotions.” Rizzoli’s Miers calls this a “timely” release in a moment when “designers are moving toward letting nature recapture spaces.”
Inside Outside
Linda O’Keefe. Timber, June
Like The Art of Outdoor Living, this book nods to gardens as rooms, depicting them as extensions of homes rather than appendages to them. O’Keefe, former creative director at Metropolitan Home, showcases the work of two dozen designers in North America and Europe who are considered masters of the form, grouping images by themes such as space, structure, movement, and mood.
New York in Bloom
Georgianna Lane. Abrams, Mar.
Photographer Lane follows up 2017’s Paris in Bloom with what Shawna Mullen, editorial director of interior design and craft at Abrams, calls another “maximalist” title, bursting with springtime daffodils, cherry trees, and magnolias, as well as close-ups of botanically inspired architectural details and peeks into the studios of local flower designers. For diehard fans of New York florals, Abrams is also releasing a tie-in wall calendar for 2020.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated the number of floral designers whose work appears in Bloom. We've updated the entry.
