Under Western Skies

This is a beautiful book and a great read. Some garden books tell you mostly about the gardeners who built the gardens, while others focus on the plants. This one is unique in that each garden has a profile first of the geographical place it inhabits, then of the gardeners who built and maintain it, and lastly of the plants that inhabit it. This makes a great read on every level.

There's a huge variety of gardens profiled, and they are split into geographic regions of the West. The gardens are both public and private, and tend towards large and well established. My hands-down favorite was the last, Cougar Annie's garden -- both for the story behind it and the incredible photos. Not much of it can be extrapolated to my Minnesota garden, but I still enjoyed the views and the stories. Gardeners west of the Rockies are likely to find lots of inspiration for their own gardens. There's a vast variety of types of gardens profiled here, though, and there are bound to be some that inspire any gardener.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for review.

What Jennifer Jewell and Caitlin Atkinson have put together here is stunning! Jennifer brings her skills as an interviewer to the forefront with excellent biographies on the gardens and their owners and designers. Caitlin's photography sweeps you away from whatever you are doing and into the scenes, from tiny vignettes to grand and glowing views of the landscape in these western gardens.

The west is such a broad region with so many different kinds of habitats and this book does a great view of encapsulating the very best snippets of some stellar gardens. I only wish we all had access to the funding and designs some of these gardeners and home owners have!

This is an excellent book to pour through and gleam ideas for any home garden.

What a gorgeous book and so close to my heart, as I adore the West and the wild gardens there. Thirty-six innovative gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific are captured in lush photos and thoughtful text that awe and inspire. A jewel!

5 of 5 Stars

Pub Date 11 May 2021
#UnderWesternSkies #NetGalley

Thanks to the author, Timber Press, and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This is the type of book that makes you discover new way of gardening, places and plants.
I loved it as it made me dream of being in one of those gardens and tending those plants
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This gorgeous, aspirational work, ‘Under Western Skies’, is both for professional gardeners and amateur gardeners who are looking for inspiration as they begin to create their own piece of paradise. It’s for aesthetes who love reading the text and looking at the glossy photographs in high-end gardening magazines.

From windswept deserts to misty seaside hills and verdant valleys, the natural landscapes of the American West offer an astounding variety of climates for gardens. Each page invites the readers to linger over the beautiful photographs and quiet text, as they move through the gardens.

As we travel from Phoenix, Arizona to Vancouver Island, Canada, Caitlin Atkinson and Jennifer Jewell are guides through 36 gardens, each as diverse as its origins, each as lovely as the other. These gardens are concentrated in the five subregions of the American West: Southwest, Southern California, Northern California, Intermountain West, and Pacific Northwest.

As if on foot we follow Atkinson’s expert lens through each garden, while Jewell introduces us to the locality, the gardener and the plants rooted in the land. In her introduction, Atkinson writes: “this book is an ode to gardening everywhere, a celebration of people engaging with the natural world around them and creating beauty and meaning in a place they call home”.

‘Under Western Skies’ is an invitation to care for nature, create with its magnificence and cultivate new relationships around it — and offers encouragement to anyone looking to bring a little more greenery into their life. It is an elegant, informative addition to any bookshelf or coffee table and a sumptuous, escapist armchair getaway.

A huge thank you to @NetGalley and @timberpress for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

An absolute gem of a book. This beautiful book is filled with inspiration and ideas for gardening wherever you are in the world. Showing a diverse amount of gardens and providing a great deal of information regarding the places and plants. The photos are stunning and a try inspiration to any keen gardener. A perfect coffee table book! One that you can refer back to whenever you need to.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to have an advanced copy in ex for an honest review.

Under Western Skies is a gorgeously photographed and inspirational coffee table book full of notable gardens in the western part of North America (mostly the USA, but some content from over the border in Canada). Released 11th May 2021 by Simon & Schuster on their Tiller Press imprint, it's 412 pages and is available in hardcover format.

This is a beautifully made and well laid out homage to the horticultural arts. The entries are lavishly illustrated, with many full page color photos. They represent a number of styles and aesthetics - mostly (but not all) on the grand scale. Nevertheless, there are a multitude of good inspirations for scaling down to use in our own domestic gardens. Each of the entries includes specific information about location, elevation, and place. The text entries also include short biographies about the originators/designers of each garden space. The geographic locations cover, refreshingly, a broader variety than many "western" horticultural books which are very California-centric.

The appendices include links and resources lists for the design companies and public gardens. There is also a good cross-referenced index with standard botanical nomenclature alongside some common names, making information easy to find quickly.
Five stars. This would make a superlative selection for gardening aficionados, a special gift, students, designers/horticulturists, library use, or as a beautiful coffee-table book to enjoy and revisit. This one has high "re-readability".

Disclosure: I received an eARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

I work with customers that receive home delivery of their materials. This book was one I wanted to review as plants and gardens are visually appealing. However this title has more working than my customers would enjoy, as they really are drawn to the photography. This book does have great photography, but the scale of the photos is smaller with only one spread per home/location. For me this one didn't work a pictorial.

Under Western Skies is one of the best botanical books I’ve ever read.

As I already mentioned in a previous review, I own a small array of potted plants and a washed out green thumb. Sometimes miracles happen; the violet that belonged to my grandmother started blooming like a pro last spring, shocking pretty much everyone, but other than that, my success in the gardening departments has always been eh.

Being able to read about gardens, about how other people turned acres of land into beautiful plant sanctuaries is a satisfying experience. An immersive one, and like it always happens with outstanding works, it took me a while to reach the ending.

Why, yes, I savor my books like sommeliers savor their wines.

**

From windswept deserts to misty seaside hills and verdant valleys, the natural landscapes of the American West offer an astounding variety of climates for gardens. Under Western Skies reveals thirty-six of the most innovative designs—all embracing and celebrating the very soul of the land on which they grow. For the gardeners featured here, nature is the ultimate inspiration rather than something to be dominated, and Under Western Skies shows the strong connection each garden has with its place. Packed with Atkinson’s stunning photographs and illuminated by Jewell’s deep interest in the relationships between people and the spaces they inhabit, Under Western Skies offers page after page of encouraging ingenuity and inventive design for passionate gardeners who call the West home.

412 pages
Gardening
Timber Press
Goodreads

**

Cover: So pretty. The color combination is perfect, a taste of what’s hidden between the pages.

Yay!

- Under Western Skies, written by Jennifer Jewell, is an ode to plant diversity. Together with photographer Caitlin Atkinson, Jewell covers the whole Western area, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast, interviewing landscapers and horticulturists, artists and gardners. Each of them opened up their house–or sanctuary, or park, or–and talked about the places they shaped up with time and patience. Do I like every garden featured in Under Western Skies? Well, nope. Has Jewell been able to show me the uniqueness of them, pointing out distinctive traits, what makes them stand out? Yes.

- Pictures! There are a lot of pictures, I’m so happy. The care and love all the owners put into their gardens transpire from each photo, and I’ll admit I let out a surprised ‘oh’ more than once, whenever I happened upon a peculiar shot. Some gardens look messy, some tidy; they’re all beautiful.

- I have to say that my favorite gardens are the southern, desertic ones. Cactuses and succulents fascinate me to no end, because of their ability to survive – thrive – under extreme conditions. However, the Idaho and Oregon gardens are just as impressive, say. Nature thrives there too, in a different way. Choosing to feature sculptures, a few man-made pieces scattered among the green, is the cherry on top.
I
- love the structure, because other than the places and the plants, we also get to know something about the people. It rounds it up in a nice way, I’m a fan 😀

Special mention:

- Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix, Arizona. Saguaros!
- Desert Moden, Phoenix, Arizona. Lovely.
- Radicle Desert, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Noticing a pattern here?
- Harborton Hill, Portland, Oregon. The colors!
- Cougar Annie’s Garden, Vancouver Island, Canada. So peculiar, I love it.
- Columbia River Gorge Garden, Hood River, Oregon. Bluestar flowers. You don’t need anything else.
- Great Salt Lake Valley, Salt Lake City, Utah. I adore the Gambel Oak road.
- Hog Hill, Sebastopol, California. I’ll be annoying and repetitive, but the colors!

Nay!

- Nothing. It’s a long book, there are a lot of pictures, the style is compelling– sometimes even a nitpicker like me can be 100% satisfied.

TL;DR

5 stars on GR, because I can’t give more.

Inspiring and picture-heavy book highlighting beautiful gardens from all over the western US, from the high deserts to the temperate rainforests. Interesting, short sections outline info about the locations, people and plants that make these gardens spectacular. Really enjoyable.

This is pretty much a perfect garden pictorial. The gardens featured are all stunning, and the book of filled with droolworthy photos that will make you want to wander through every one of them. The text is engaging, educational, and inspirational, giving us the details of each garden: the garden itself, and the area it's in, the people involved in creating and maintaining it, and the plants contained within. This is a perfect way to spend an afternoon, dreaming of beautifully diverse Western gardens!

#UnderWesternSkies #NetGalley