My New Book – The Downsized Garden

THE DOWNSIZED GARDEN BY KERRY ANN

MENDEZ

My head is in the clouds!  St. Lynn’s Press, based in Pittsburgh, offered me the opportunity to write on a topic that is near and dear to my heart:  The Downsized Garden. This is exactly the journey I had to take after my husband’s awful accident.  As many of you know, Sergio broke his neck in August 2011, but by God’s grace, he wasn’t paralyzed.  As a result of the injury, he had to take early retirement from RPI and I accepted a full time, salaried position with benefits at Faddegon’s Nursery.  Working at Faddegon’s was such a blessing, on many different levels.  But the 40+ hour work week, plus commute, made it impossible to continue to care for my husband and gardens (which have been featured in many magazines) as I had done in the past.  Time for some creative editing.  My goal was to end up with gorgeous gardens that still provided great joy, but reduced my maintenance time by 50%, while still enhancing property value.  The exercises I went through – from evaluating if a garden should stay, be reduced in size, and/or undergo a makeover (i.e., transforming a large mixed perennial bed into one comprised mostly of flowering shrubs) – to playing ‘switcheroos’ from high maintenance plants to exceedingly well behaved ones that offered greater seasonal interest – resulted in a landscape that was more beautiful and less work than I had imagined.   The steps for evaluating and downsizing gardens, as well as recommended design solutions, and extraordinary, ‘work-for-you’ plants, are the basis of this four-color, hardcover book, The Downsized Garden, scheduled to be released in March 2015.  The photos you see above show one of my downsized gardens.  The garden had been 8′ wide, and 30’+ feet long, planted mostly with perennials.  I reduced it to about 3′ wide with almost all flowering shrubs plus a few coral bells, hosta and Japanese forest grasses.

And here is where I need your help. I am looking for great before and after photographs of gardens that have undergone this transformation.  If you, or someone you know, has gone through a similar makeover, please send photos!  Or perhaps you started creating extremely, no-fuss landscapes right out of the garden gate.  Bravo!  I want to see pictures.

I am also looking for photos of:

*Great flower and/or vegetable containers
*Lovely foliage gardens
*creatively pruned shrubs or evergreens
*groundcover landscapes
*edging options for gardens
*gardens with eye-catching focal points
*outdoor entertainment rooms or kitchens
*examples of connecting indoor and outdoor ‘rooms’
*Extremely, low-maintenance gardens you created that you think should be in this book!

I will share these with my publisher and you may be one of the featured gardens in the book.   We’ll all be famous!  Please email images at pyours1@gmail.com.