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 allée 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.

"These two landscape architects had served as ever-patient mentors in my early days of garden writing for Newsday, on Long Island, when I hardly knew a perennial from a petunia, and later for the New York Times, when I was stretching out into writing about public parks, environmental restoration and landscape architecture. No question was too small. No time too busy. For the months we were working on The Good Garden, we three spent a few hours every week talking about the essence of good design. For instance, they may plant an allée of Natchez crepe myrtles marching down to a Hamptons beach because these icons of such Southern cities as Charleston and Savannah are tolerant of salt winds and lean soils. Or they may use a single London plane tree, with its high spreading branches, as an airy ceiling for a summer terrace. And they’d be loath to bulldoze a cluster of wild cherry trees, their trunks and limbs sculpted by the wind, as other designers might do in order to create an uninterrupted lawn."
—Anne Raver, 1st Dibs' Introspective Magazine

"Known for his prolific work on the estates of New York's Long Island, Edmund Hollander creates grand gardens to embrace the palatial homes that dot the enclaves of the Hamptons: majestic oak allées leading to shingled manses, sharply sculpted hedges ringing sleek contemporary piles. In The Good Garden, Hollander explores the alchemy that connects landscape to residence. The volume, helpfully divided into sections by element—such as borders, hedges, and pool plantings—offers verdant insight into the poetic ways nature can improve and enhance architecture. It's lush, leafy escapism of the highest order."
—Veranda

"Large or small, a pool under the sun is the quintessence of summertime in the Hamptons. In his new book, The Good Garden, Manhattan- and Hamptons-based landscape architect Edmund Hollander has gathered some of the memorable pools and adjoining gardens he and his firm have created during the past several decades. From an infinity-eddge masterpiece with a glass wall overlooking the ocean to a simple in-ground pool, Hollander stresses 'understanding the human, natural, and architectrual ecology of a site.'"
—Hamptons Cottages & Gardens

"Flip through for breathtaking examples of their layered, nuanced approach, whether the subject is a gorgeous allée of cherry trees supplying seductive cover for a house, a clipped privet hedge providing an architectural backdrop for a large sculpture, or a dreamy profusion of flowering plants enclosing a swimming pool."
—Town & Country