Life in the Garden

Williams (Love Affairs with Houses), an award-winning interior designer, offers a lavish garden coffee-table book that’s mixed with memoir. It is as close to a personal tour of her many-spaced 18th-century Connecticut home and garden as readers can get without booking a ticket to one of her tours. As might be expected of Williams project, the design of the book is notable. For a start, it is big: 408 pages and measuring 12.4 by 10.4 inches. It is crafted to showcase Schlechter’s 400 photographs, which create an immersive effect: sweeping green clipped hedges, hydrangeas, gray-cream gravel, garden ornament, the velvet-deep of an iris in close-up, a once intricate fence consumed by wayward shrubbery, a fern unfolding in a spiral. As the book walks readers through the garden’s lush yet ordered spaces, Williams lists the plants she grows, including notes on varieties. Other pockets of text offer memories of her Christmas celebrations, lessons on flower arranging, and a history of how she built her garden. A brief resources page rounds out the work.