Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0670883557, Hardcover)

Open the door and step outside to see how the Arts & Crafts aesthetic has shaped gardens over the years as surely as it has influenced architecture and furniture. This follow-up volume to Inside the Bungalow: America's Arts and Crafts Interior shows the characteristic brick, tile and wood, wide-porched exteriors of the bungalow style half-buried beneath wisteria vines, arbors, flowers, and foliage.

The bungalows that the gardens surround range from the archetypal dark, timbered wood and stone to the rustic, grand, and even Southwestern, offering a visual feast of gardens to match. The authors emphasize not specific plants, but the architectural elements and style of such gardens: tiled fountains, pergolas, pathways, and the use of stone, timbers, and courtyards to tie house and garden together.

Both text and photos focus in on details like outdoor light fixtures, hose bibs, mailboxes, birdhouses, fences and lattice as part of the characteristic Arts & Crafts aesthetic. The "Garden Portraits" chapter includes garden plans as well as photos of bungalow exteriors from Seattle to southern California, emphasizing that it is not the plants themselves but how they are grouped to emphasize the architecture and the hardscaping that creates an Arts & Crafts garden. Still, there are certain plants that appear over and over again in the photos, and have the right look for such gardens--ornamental grasses, vines, climbing roses, and plants with bold structural foliage like iris, ferns, clivia, and hosta. The charming chapter on potting sheds and tree houses, as well as the exuberant and colorful plantings throughout, go a long way toward explaining why people have been so captivated by "bungalowmania" for more than three decades. --Valerie Easton