The Balanced Garden: Town, Country, & Courtyard

The Balanced Garden is one long, glorious stroll through more than thirty of Paul Bangay's most recently designed gardens; an invitation to discover the very different charms of a variety of gardens from the minimalism of a rooftop garden to the vistas and "rooms" of an extensive country landscape.

As always, Paul is passionate about showing his readers the elements of good design - symmetry, equilibrium, focus, purposeful axes, correct scale and proportions, simplicity and restraint - which he sums up as the achievement of balance.

But the great strength and surprise of all Paul's writing is his engagement not only with the creation of beauty through balance but with the problems and practicalities of garden making. He loves the challenges that sites, conditions and plants continually throw out to the designer, and what he has to say about his specific solutions is constantly enlightening.