The Spirited Garden: Creative Private Retreats [Hardcover]

A private view of intensely creative residential gardens, lovingly designed and tended by the plant-obsessed owners themselves. Hundreds of inspiring photographs show home gardeners how to successfully inject elements of their own personality—as well as plants in unique combinations—into their own yards.

A mix of high plant/horticultural knowledge and a love of artistically repurposed everyday materials creating unique features will strike a chord with all those who dream of perking up their own gardens. Doreen sought out the most original gardens to feature those that use cleverly repurposed industrial and found materials: handmade archways of gnarled branches or hand-welded fences, mixed with unique sculptures and structures. Text and deep captions full of plant IDs highlight unusual or remarkable collections of flora and foliage that will inspire readers to re-create or come up with their own planting designs and combinations. In The Spirited Garden:Creative Private Retreats (Rizzoli USA, 2025) by garden photographer Doreen L. Wynja, written with Lorene Edwards Forkner, you'll find 16 gardens lovingly created by their owners throughout the Pacific Northwest.
There's an essay that accompanies each entry, explaining the garden's history and its theme. Favorite plants are also listed, and of course there are gorgeous photographs of each that will inspire any gardener, no matter if you live in a different party of the country.
As Wynja says in the preface to the book, These gardens are about the people behind them, their journeys, and how their passions inspired me to use my lens to share their soulful, yet often humble, stories with the world...these gardens are very personal reflections of their creators, every one of them invested with heart and soul. This is garden-making expressed by that inner drive or need, that visceral, almost primal urge to be part of nature thl“\