Book Review: Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands
Contributor
- Topics: Inspired Gardens and Design
Summer 2024
Shrouded in Light is not so much of a book as a deep artistic and horticultural meditation, one that spoils the eyes with breathtaking photos and excites the mind with vibrant descriptions, all the while offering practical ways to incorporate shrubland-esque elements into landscape design.
Do you ever hear music when you’re immersed in miles of meandering scrub? If so, you’ll appreciate the complexity that the task of writing this book requires – one that authors Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi maneuver beautifully. Their horticultural meditation takes many forms. It is simultaneously an intense rollercoaster of a rock album while also a calm, quiet nod to the energy that flows in the Earth and manifests itself as small, woody shrubs.
Gardeners, artists, and all humans are invited to look closely, look from afar, be excited, be uncomfortable, be in awe of these woody beings that inhabit the most challenging of environments. There is movement as soon as you open the book—the authors did a swell job of capturing as much as is possible in print form.
In addition to artistic inspiration, there is also an abundance of knowledge and techniques for those who partner with shrubs to design plant communities in the landscape. The authors don’t hold back, providing plant commentaries on the design of several landscape examples
However, it is the shrubs themselves that do the heavy lifting in this compilation—enticing, flowing, playing, rippling, persisting, and wasting away where others dare not. It is effortless to swoon over pages and pages of expertly curated inspiration; one might question whether the reader really has a choice. Shrub sirens? Twisting arms pull you in, challenging the reader—as Williams and Guidi state—to accept “a deeper understanding of what beauty is, beyond what just makes us happy.”
Reviewed by Mary Bagazinski – Arborist in training and plant gremlin, Devil Mountain Nursery
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