Flower Power: Designing Gardens for Year-Round Wonder by Jac Semmler dismantles the rule-bound approach to garden design and replaces it with a plant-driven philosophy built on layering, texture, resilience, and creative vision across every season.
About This Book
At its core, Flower Power is about reclaiming garden design as a creative act rather than a prescriptive exercise. Semmler — a practitioner working at the intersection of horticulture, planting design, and plant advocacy — introduces a compositional framework that moves beyond seasonal colour charts and rigid planting plans. Her approach centres on understanding heroic and supportive plants as a layered system, one that responds to climate, texture, and pattern to produce gardens of genuine beauty. Innovative graphic guides clarify methods for composition and layout, while a seasonal care calendar gives practical grounding to what is, at heart, a deeply imaginative approach to plant-driven garden design.
Key Features
- 352 pages of planting philosophy, graphic composition guides, seasonal care calendars, and practical how-tos
- Written by Jac Semmler, director of Super Bloom plant practice and author of Super Bloom and The Super Bloom Handbook
- Published by Thames & Hudson, ISBN 9781760764548
What You'll Discover
- A layered planting philosophy that distinguishes heroic plants from supportive ones, and how to deploy both for compositional depth across all seasons
- Innovative graphic guides that translate abstract design principles — texture, pattern, rhythm — into workable methods for garden layout and plant selection
- A seasonal calendar of care grounded in dry summer planting conditions, with particular relevance to Australian and Mediterranean-climate gardens
- How resilience and delight can coexist in a single garden: a framework for creating spaces that change, flourish, and captivate regardless of season or climate
About the Author
Jac Semmler is a plant practitioner, internationally recognised horticulturist, and director of Super Bloom plant practice, based at her home and plant lab, Heartland, on the outskirts of Melbourne. An innovator in dry summer planting design, she is the author of Super Bloom: A Field Guide to Flowers for Every Gardener and The Super Bloom Handbook, both published internationally. Her work spans planting design, high-skill horticulture, and plant-meets-art projects, united by a mission of plants for the people in a changing climate.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 352
- Dimensions: 28.2 × 22.2 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781760764548
- Publisher: Thames & Hudson
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Landscape architects, garden designers, and serious home gardeners seeking a creative, plant-led design philosophy grounded in Australian and dry-climate horticulture.