Paradise by Design by Kathryn Phillips - used book

Every day when she arrives at work, landscape architect Joni Janecki faces a daunting task: to create a piece of paradise for her clients. For this young, up-and-coming designer, that often means bucking mainstream design and gardening culture. Janecki rejects the expansive lawns and tightly clipped shrubs that have become the standards of America's created landscape. Instead, she tries to introduce the natural world to her clients by landscaping their homes, parks, and businesses with the native plants that the larger gardening culture often ignores.

Kathryn Phillips follows Janecki as she struggles against nursery fads, anxious clients, pest plants, pesky budgets, and self-doubts to design paradise. The result, in the tradition of our best science and nature journalists, is an engrossing narrative which illuminates the complex forces that shape so much of the natural world we see each day. She introduces us to plant promoters, who want to carpet the world in roses, and nursery retailers who have to adapt to ever-changing fads.

By the book's end, readers will be rooting for Janecki and seeing the created landscape around them-and its often tenuous relationship with nature-with new eyes., Like Phillips's previous book, Tracking the Vanishing Frogs, this series of essays on the moral issues relating to garden design explores the effects human interest has on the objects of its attention. Wild or native plant gardening is an increasingly popular trend, but its ramifications are not always the kind that logic might suggest. In using native plants, we hope to create ecologically sensible and appropriate gardens that are easy to care for. When the nursery industry responds with a furious backlash of recrimination, why are we surprised? Advocates for using as many regional natives as possible in public landscapes are accused of being plant nazis--and as it turns out, that appellation is occasionally correct. Nobody intended the native plant movement to trigger wholesale destruction of habitat in order to provide gardens with eco-cool plants, yet how many gardeners insist upon learning where their native plants really come from? Phillips's touch is light yet deft, and her reach is broad without losing focus. There is no strident anger here, but her interviews with botanists, horticulturists, designers, and gardeners address dozens of intriguing and complex issues. Few books this provocative are this fun to read. --Ann Lovejoy