The private oasis : the living landscape

Edmund Hollander and Maryanne Connelly, two of New York's most eminent landscape designers, best known for their work in the Hamptons, reveal how plants can add sensuality, texture, structure, and color to any garden. Crisp hornbeam hedges lining a country drive and throwing geometric shadows on the gravel below.

Decadent cascades of fragrant wisteria spilling over a stone pergola.

Rustling leaves along an allee of delicate crepe myrtle trees.

Waving blossoms of roses, sage, and hydrangeas - along a salty shoreline.

Edmund Hollander Landscape Architects creates gardens filled with unexpected textures, colors, and sounds meant to appeal to all the senses, inviting us to truly live in the landscape. This volume presents dozens of gorgeous estate gardens throughout the Northeast, approached thematically; individual sections reveal how components such as gateways, paths, pool terraces, bosques and groves, walls, and borders contribute to lush garden rooms, windblown seaside gardens, calming meadow gardens, intricate formal gardens, and shady tracts of woodland.

Over 300 color photographs of beautiful properties in the Hamptons, Connecticut, and upstate New York provide glimpses of the best garden design happening today while breaking down its ideas for the home gardener.

Evocative text by New York Times and Landscape Architecture columnist Anne Raver details how the firm works to envelop visitors in landscapes that feel entirely whole: plantings near architecture create a dynamic entry progression; hardscape features that lead out into a broader garden gradually cede to more natural, living elements; pools are surrounded by gracious swaths of flowers that bloom in sequence as the season progresses to provide privacy for bathers and a sense of quiet seclusion.

The ideas presented here will help owners of gardens of every size enjoy their land to the fullest.