Garden Wonderland Create Life-Changing Outdoor Spaces for Beauty, Harvest, Meaning, and Joy

A visual feast of garden design inspiration that embraces diversity and teaches you how to create a lush, colorful, edible, and meaningful garden wonderland of your own.

“Through story and imagery, Garden Wonderland reminds us over and over that plants should be part of everyday for everyone: as food, experience, memory, and creativity.”—Jennifer Jewell, creator and host of the Cultivating Place public radio program and podcast, and author of What We Sow

Award-winning garden designer Leslie Bennett creates gardens filled with stunning layers of color and texture. But even more than that, they “feed the eye and nourish the soul” (Elle Decor).

Featuring practical how-to information alongside examples from nineteen gardens, Bennett shows how to incorporate personal and edible elements into the landscape to honor a variety of cultures, while including families of all shapes and sizes, to create space that nurtures self, community, and more. For example, the team designed a garden for the cofounder of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation to showcase art from emerging Black artists, while for a vegan chef's garden, they incorporated unusual vegetables that can't be found in grocery stores. A garden for a daughter of diplomats reflects the many places she's lived around the world; for a family that wants to beautify their neighborhood, they designed a vibrant community-oriented front yard.

With chapters on floral, edible, gathering, healing, and cultural wonderlands, Bennett provides advice for tailoring a garden to your own needs, whether it's a place to host elegant garden parties, for children to play, to grow your own food and creativity, or a sanctuary to rest and relax. In Garden Wonderland, Bennett helps you unlock the potential of your garden to become a space of inspiring natural beauty, abundance, connection, and belonging.

Leslie Bennett is the owner of Pine House Edible Gardens and coauthor of The Beautiful Edible Garden. She is a winner of the American Horticultural Society’s Landscape Design Award and founder of Black Sanctuary Gardens. Her work has been featured in Better Homes & Gardens, Martha Stewart Living, Elle Décor, Architectural Digest, Sunset, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Gardenista and more. Leslie holds degrees from Harvard University, Columbia Law School, and the University College London in the fields of environmental justice, land use law, and cultural property and preservation. She lives and gardens in Oakland, California with her two children.

Julie Chai has spent her career covering gardening and landscapes, and is the editor of Floret Farm’s A Year in Flowers, Floret Farm’s Cut Flower Garden, and Floret Farm’s Discovering Dahlias. Her work has been featured by media including Martha Stewart Living, Better Homes & Gardens, the San Francisco Chronicle, Gardenista, HGTV, and Sunset Magazine, where she was the senior garden editor. She lives and gardens in Los Altos, California, with her husband and son.