The Barn Garden: Making a Place

by Tom Stuart-Smith

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction

84 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[romney · Rating 4 out of 5]

A charming curiosity. This is an account of Tom Stuart-Smith's own family garden, which is pretty large and includes a prairie, meadow, veg garden etc. It's a relatively small book (not coffee table sized), there isn't much text and the pictures are a mixture of professional looking and family photos capturing work in progress. There is some information about plants and how they've gone about making the garden, but this is more of a list than a how to. Enjoyable but given how much it costs second-hand now I would instead go for his new book in Oct 2020 which seems more coffee-table-ish and track him down on instagram in the meantime for many shots of his dog trotting around the prairie garden.

[Sally Randall · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read about how the author transformed the area around his converted barn on his parents' farm. I love the author's work as a garden designer and have been meaning to read this for years (it's been on my bookshelf a long time!). It was reasonably informative, but rather 'planterly' with sweeping descriptions. But food for thought and it has given me some ideas, though I would have preferred more human endeavour and colour.