Garden Wonderland: Create Life-Changing Outdoor Spaces for Beauty, Harvest, Meaning, and Joy /// Leslie Bennett and Julie Chai

A visual feast of garden design inspiration that embraces diversity and teaches you how to create a lush, colorful, edible, and meaningful garden wonderland of your own.

Award-winning garden designer Leslie Bennett creates gardens filled with stunning layers of color and texture. But even more than that, they “feed the eye and nourish the soul” (Elle Decor).

Featuring practical how-to information alongside examples from nineteen gardens, Bennett shows how to incorporate personal and edible elements into the landscape to honor a variety of cultures, while including families of all shapes and sizes, to create space that nurtures self, community, and more. For example, the team designed a garden for the cofounder of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation to showcase art from emerging Black artists, while for a vegan chef’s garden, they incorporated unusual vegetables that can’t be found in grocery stores. A garden for a daughter of diplomats reflects the many places she’s lived around the world; for a family that wants to beautify their neighborhood, they designed a vibrant community-oriented front yard.

With chapters on floral, edible, gathering, healing, and cultural wonderlands, Bennett provides advice for tailoring a garden to your own needs, whether it’s a place to host elegant garden parties, for children to play, to grow your own food and creativity, or a sanctuary to rest and relax. In Garden Wonderland, Bennett helps you unlock the potential of your garden to become a space of inspiring natural beauty, abundance, connection, and belonging.

BIO

Leslie Bennett is an Oakland, CA based landscape designer and writer who creates gardens that help to nourish us and tell the story of who we are. Raised in the Bay Area and based in Oakland since 2009, Leslie holds degrees from Harvard University, Columbia Law School and the University College London in the fields of environmental justice, land use law, cultural property and preservation.

Leslie is the founder and owner of Pine House Edible Gardens, an Oakland, CA based landscape design/build firm that creates aesthetic edible gardens and productive outdoor spaces, and is co-author of The Beautiful Edible Garden (Ten Speed Press, 2013). Leslie's work as a principal at Pine House entails guiding the overall vision for the firm’s work and working collaboratively with the Pine House design team to create culturally grounded gardens that provide as much visual inspiration as they do organic harvests of food, flowers and medicinal herbs.

Leslie has been featured in Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, OprahDaily.com, Martha Stewart Living, Better Homes & Gardens, Sunset Magazine, Garden Design, C Magazine, American Gardener, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle