How to Make a Garden: The 7 Essential Steps for the Canadian Gardener - Tapa dura

From Canada’s leading garden expert comes a unique and practical step-by-step guide to creating the garden of your dreams.

With her inimitable charm and boundless knowledge, noted gardener and author Marjorie Harris establishes the template for creating the garden that is right for your tiny urban plot, barren suburban tract, overgrown meadow, condo roof or balcony. Packed with practical advice, helpful sidebars and attractive photographs, How to Make a Garden takes you through Marjorie’s seven essential steps to garden-making – the culmination of twenty-five years of her experience.

Gardening is all about balance: creating shady patches and hot spots, combining exuberant jungles and tailored edges, making social areas and solitary spaces, planting tall trees and delicate groundcovers. To craft a living mosaic requires contemplation and planning: Marjorie calls this unique and necessary step “pregardening.” Once you’ve tackled this thoughtful stage, How to Make a Garden shows you how to create a solid soil foundation for your plantings, establish just the right garden style for you and your site, draw a garden map, select the perfect plants with the indispensable plant list, plant them correctly, and maintain the health and vibrancy of your garden. Marjorie understands all the pitfalls and anxieties gardeners experience, and she counters them with clear-headed, lively advice that is never intimidating and always creative. How to Make a Garden is essential and inspiring reading for every gardener and would-be gardener.

“This book is for people who are baffled by empty spaces, cowed by weeds and longing to have something gorgeous to look at. It’s also for people who have lovely gardens but need to be reminded of the basics – the core ideas that make a garden truly successful.”
—From How to Make a Garden

Marjorie Harris is the national gardening columnist for the Globe and Mail and the editor-in-chief of Gardening Life magazine. She is the author of several gardening books, including The Canadian Gardener and Botanica North America. She lives in Toronto, where she gardens seriously and for the amusement of her husband, writer Jack Batten.