The garden in winter

by Rosemary Verey

This guide to creating a garden that looks and feels good even in the darkest depths of winter includes chapters on design and colour, along with work plans and a plant catalogue. It reveals the secrets of the successful winter garden, the use of space and an understanding of the patterns created by paths and walls, and the silhouettes of trunks and twisted branches.;The book demonstrates how to create an elegant framework, and how to plan and plant for effect in this often-neglected season. A selective catalogue portrays more than 200 plants, notable for their winter flowers, berries, floiage or bark.;Rosemary Verey has created a garden at Barnsley House in Gloucestershire and is the author of "The Scented Garden", "Classic Garden Design", "The American Woman's Garden" and "The New Englishwoman's Garden".

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction

168 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1988

About the author

Rosemary Verey, OBE, VMH was an internationally known English garden designer, lecturer and prolific garden writer who designed the famous garden at Barnsley House, near Cirencester.

She was born Rosemary Isabel Baird Sandilands and educated at Eversley School, Folkestone, and University College, London. In 1939 she married David Verey, whose family owned Barnsley House.

Verey's most famous garden design was that of her own house, Barnsley House near Cirencester in Gloucestershire. In 1970 she opened the garden for one day to the public for the National Gardens Scheme but eventually it was open 6 days per week to accommodate the 30,000 annual visitors. In 1984 when her husband David died, Rosemary began designing gardens for American and British clients. Most notable are HRH the Prince of Wales, Elton John, Princess Michael of Kent, the Marquess of Bute and the New York Botanical Garden.

Rosemary Verey was well known for taking imposing elements from large public gardens and bringing them into scale for the home gardeners use. Her laburnum walk, which has been photographed many times, is an example of this technique. The National Trust's Bodnant Garden in North Wales has a very large laburnum walk that inspired Verey to plant a similar, smaller scale laburnum walk at Barnsley House. Verey is also noted for making vegetable (ornamental potager) gardens fashionable once again. The potager at Barnsley House was inspired by that at Villandry, on the Loire in France.

She was awarded the OBE in 1996 and in 1999 from the Royal Horticultural Society the highest accolade that Society can award, the Victoria Medal of Honour (VMH).

Reviews

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book via a used books store and was so pleased to notice last year that it had been reissued after being out of print for a while. For me, this is the winter-garden standard to which all other books about wintertime in the temperate garden are measured. And the pictures are gorgeous, too.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

More than 35 years after it was first published, The Garden in Winter remains useful. Many of the photos are of large gardens with a lot of topiary (Rosemary Verey knew a lot of grand people), so not very relatable for ordinary gardeners, but others show clipped (or not) evergreens used on a more intimate scale.

Gardening fashions have changed since publication. They are now more naturalistic, less formal, with more use made of plants with striking bark, interesting structure or attractive seed heads.

There are chapters on space, structure & pattern; winter pictures (views from the house, the approach, etc); winter colour (which includes black, white, brown & green) & work & pleasure in the winter garden. The book ends with 180 plant portraits, less than half of which have photographic portraits

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unfortunately there was no secret weapon. Most of the plants named in this book will not live in my climate, or will certainly not flower during the winter. I had hoped for a chance to have more color. But I thoroughly enjoyed how she divided the book: by color, season, type of plant, soil, etc. A lot of information. Especially the list of plants.

[Michael Heath-Caldwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book of photography of landscape gardens in winter in the UK where they do winter in a big way.