The Layered Garden: Design Lessons for Year-Round Beauty from Brandywine Cottage

Enter the mind of the creator of the gardens at  Brandywine  Cottage and find inspiration for your next gardening project with this guide that includes “breathtaking” photos of the Cottage (Library Journal).

Brandywine Cottage is David Culp’s beloved two-acre Pennsylvania garden where he mastered the design technique of layering—interplanting many different species in the same area so that as one plant passes its peak, another takes over. The result is a nonstop parade of color that begins with a tapestry of heirloom daffodils and hellebores in spring and ends with a jewel-like blend of Asian wildflowers at the onset of winter. To illustrate how layering works, Culp takes you on a personal tour through each part of his celebrated garden: the woodland garden, the perennial border, the kitchen garden, the shrubbery, and the walled garden.  

The Layered Garden  shows you how to recreate Culp’s majestic display, starting with a basic lesson in layering—how to choose the correct plants by understanding how they grow and change throughout the seasons, how to design a layered garden, and how to maintain it. The book culminates with a chapter dedicated to signature plants for all four seasons.

“Gardenmaking, in its finest form, is a celebration of life and of love. David and his book epitomize this.”  —Lauren Springer Ogden