Inside Outside

April 15, 2019
O’Keefe, former creative director of Metropolitan Home magazine, delivers an opulent look at equally lavish green spaces. There are no portraits of the owners, but a sense of personality imbues each garden featured—a total of 25 in all, in locales that include Tuusula, Finland, and San Marino, Calif. These are places to spark desire in any avid gardener: vast cultivated landscapes, clipped and espaliered to perfection; long vistas framed in hedge-encased doorways; and spaces designed around urns, spheres, and sculptures. Even the most modest garden evokes a living ballroom. Both implicitly and explicitly, O’Keefe equates the layout of gardens with interior design. She observes at one point that “some of the flowers, vines, and shrubs are so decoratively intrusive they could be wallpaper,” and later laments that landscape design lacks interior design’s strict color formulas (60% anchor color; 30% supporting color; 10% accent color). She fills that void, however, with plentiful guidelines contained in paragraph-long sidebars on the place of shape, framing, texture, and even humor in garden design. O’Keefe’s practical advice, alongside captions describing the plant or technique being featured, will make this visually rich book as at home in the garden as it is on the coffee table.