Media
Refresh Your Garden Design with Color, Texture & Form
Garden transformations don’t always require an expensive overhaul by a team of professionals. Sometimes all it takes is a fresh perspective and a new way to look at your garden. With a creative approach to planting design, Refresh Your Garden Design will teach just how easy it is to wake a weary garden.
Learn how to break down traditional garden design principles into easy-to-understand and, more importantly, easy-to-implement solutions. Inspirational photographs highlight and reinforce real-life situations, helping to not only to identify what has gone wrong with a garden, but how to fix the problem. All the while transforming your garden into a rich and layered tapestry.
What people are saying:
“This book can help you find your garden’s weak spots, then freshen them using the right mix of flowers, foliage, textures, and colors. With design tips sprinkled throughout, it’s like having a garden design professional beside you to help bring your space alive…” – Kathleen Brenzel, Sunset Magazine
“Rebecca’s keen designer’s eye and generous personality shine through in every page of this book. She arms you with common-sense techniques to see your garden with new eyes and identify areas for improvement. Her lessons break down garden design into its basic elements, and she teaches you how to use those elements to build your garden back up again.” – Michelle Gervais, Senior Editor, Fine Gardening
“Rebecca Sweet’s useful and beautiful new book…is filled with a bounty of professional tips and techniques that demystify the design process. If you try even one of her many great ideas for turning a drab yard into a dazzling landscape, you’ll be rewarded with a newfound confidence to go further. Rebecca’s engaging voice comes through with positive encouragement as shares years of experience with her DIY reader.” – Debra Prinzing, co-author of The 50 Mile Bouquet
Garden Up!
Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces
Filled with design tips, plant ideas and over 200 photos, Garden Up! Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces, offers inspiration and how-to information for enhancing any outdoor space with vertical elements.
Rebecca Sweet and co-author Susan Morrison cover everything from living wall projects simple enough for a home gardener to tackle to creative solutions for narrow beds and blank walls and fences. An Amazon “Best Books of 2011” selection.
What People Are Saying:
“Garden Up is a breath of fresh air! In an easy to read, personal tone, authors Morrison and Sweet have offered dozens of fantastic ideas for creating vertical elements in a wide variety of garden settings.” – Fran Sorin, CBS Radio News
“ In their fabulous new book entitled Garden Up! the authors…share a plethora of tips for home gardeners on how and what to grow vertically in their yards…Filled with dazzling garden photographs that make you want to dash straight out to the nursery.” – Annie Spiegelman, The Huffington Post
“A small to non-existent yard does not mean you are left to languish on a spartan concrete pad. The authors of Garden Up…remind readers that there are more gardening options that just the surface beneath your feet.” – Mary Beth Breckenridge, McClatchy-Tribune
Growing a Greener World, Episode 1207: Small Space Gardening
Have a small yard or garden? Maybe just a patio or balcony? Driveway? No space is too small or oddly-shaped for a bit of garden, and you’d be surprised how with a few design tricks you’ll see you have more growing space than you imagined.
Professional garden designers Rebecca Sweet and Susan Morrison give us tips to deal with all of those pesky problems. By selecting plants of different heights, you add depth to a shallow bed. Break up a flat wall by training select plants up a trellis and interspersing garden art and found objects. Wall container planters and planting pockets create growing space out of seemingly nothing.
Have a long, narrow space like a side yard? With raised beds and clustered containers, you add height and interest to break up the corridor. If you have a large property, there may still be smaller areas within that seem awkward for planting, and these same techniques will work for you as well.
Rebecca and her gardens have been featured in various national magazines and books, including:
Sunset Magazine
Fine Gardening
Garden Gate
Rebecca’s gardens are also featured in the following books:
Also Featured In:
Living Homegrown Podcast with Theresa Loe
LH 108: Massive Change – Saying Goodbye to a Beloved Garden
We all go through ups and downs in our lives and those things can actually impact our garden. Usually a traumatic experience changes us as people. But you know what? It can change the gardener within us as well. And that can mean we need to completely pivot our garden style or even location. In this episode, host Theresa Loe brings on garden designer Rebecca Sweet who happens to have one of the most beloved private gardens near the San Francisco area. People have been touring and admiring her garden for many, many years. Rebecca shares inspiring and insightful tips for when we may feel the need for a massive change in our own gardening lives. It’s a very touching interview! You’ll learn: How any life change can make you see your garden differently, What to take when you move, Design tips for a brand new garden, How to make the experience a happy transition, Why care sheets for the new owners can save your garden’s future, How to send off your old garden with a treasure hunt. As always, you can get more resources at www.LivingHomegrown.com/108 as well as a full transcript of the episode.
Living Homegrown Podcast with Theresa Loe
LH 71: Refresh Your Garden Design with Rebecca Sweet
Have you ever stepped out into your existing garden and suddenly realized it has lost its sparkle? It may have looked fabulous when planted it many years ago, but now things are looking…well, shabby at best. Some plants have outgrown their space, while others are looking like they are on their way out. The problem is, you aren’t sure what needs to be done and you’re worried you might have to start all over.
Eeek! Well, fear not.
On today’s episode, I interview the fabulous garden designer Rebecca Sweet and she walks us through some simple steps to determining what’s WRONG with our existing landscape. And THEN…She tells us exactly how to fix it!! She spills the beans on all the tricks the landscape designers know by heart. (The best part is… it’s all so EASY!)
And yes, we discuss edibles too!
Interested in learning how to Transform Your Garden?
Join me in this FREE five episode class – just click on the image below to get started!
Transform your garden without the expensive professional overhaul! Join landscape designer and author Rebecca Sweet as she shares essential techniques for reviving your garden design.
First, Rebecca will teach you how to begin your garden transformation by editing your garden and breaking down key elements using photos.
Then, find out how to create echoes in your space to add a sense of continuity using color, texture and form. Begin with the simplest element, color, before exploring the unexpected and touchable textures that the plant world has to offer.
Finally, learn about shape and form and how to incorporate this subtle element into your garden design. By the end of this class, you will have identified gardening mistakes and learned how to correct them with easy-to-understand and easy-to-implement solutions.
Articles written by Rebecca for various national publications, including:
Horticulture Magazine
Highlights from my monthly column: ‘Harmony in the Garden’
Fine Gardening
Sunset Magazine
Country Living
The American Gardener
The Designer
