Book Review: The Thoughtful Gardener
The Thoughtful Gardener by Jinny Blom
The Thoughtful Gardener is a beautiful autobiographical book by award winning garden designer Jinny Blom. It is the story of her quest to become a ‘master craftsman’ of garden design and the evolution of her style over 20+ years across more than 250 gardens around the world.
Jinny’s story begins when at age 36 she decided to quit her job as a psychologist and taking a leap of faith she took the plunge to become a fulltime garden designer.
The Thoughtful Gardener showcases selected garden projects Jinny has worked on, highlighting her practical design process and draw on her psychology background.
Jinny focuses on observing and exploring each individual site in order to ensure that the garden design belongs and amplifies what is already there. Jinny seeks to ensure that the planned garden will fit harmoniously both into its natural location and the cultural context of its location. As Jinny says; “Things that work together in natural harmony are beautiful”.
Jinny is a practical gardener for whom her hands-on process begins with walking the area, making handmade line drawings and design mock-ups that take into account all the elements (from sun to earth to water) and then follows this approach through with the actual planting. This is a process she equates to creating a painting.
Jinny’s focus is to replicate design layouts that are close to nature, but not wild. Her philosophy is centred on the “gardener is the garden” and that while design is a noble pursuit it is secondary to gardening itself. She also believes that unless you actually garden it is difficult to make a garden for someone else. Understanding the time and effort it takes to maintain a garden is critical to its long-term success.
To showcase Jinny’s design principles The Thoughtful Gardener is illustrated throughout with stunning full colour photographs, black and white sketches of her projects. These transport you round the world ranging from an “anti-garden” in Sussex which asks the question “What is wild?” to a unique design that aspires to blend a new building into the ‘raw and sensitive” landscape of Kenya.
The Thoughtful Gardener, a book which I think will appeal to everyone who loves to garden. This is a book for practical gardeners and actual and aspiring garden designers looking to be inspired to create new spaces in their garden.
@ Black Teal Bay rating: 8/10
