By Kathryn Herman
Kathryn Herman’s first monograph, A Moment in Time: Designing a Country Garden, documents thirty years of work on her own home, a 1928 cottage on the twenty-acre Pepperidge Farm estate in Fairfield, Connecticut — across seven distinct garden spaces: the perennial garden, the meadow, the greenhouse, the trough garden, the productive garden, the pool garden, and the layered grounds that connect them.
In the foreword, Herman traces her thinking to a revelatory week at Hadspen House in Somerset, under the mentorship of Penelope Hobhouse and Nori and Sandra Pope, who were managing the garden at the time. The color-saturated borders upended her understanding of what a planting could do — color, she came to see, was not decoration but a tool for crafting emotion and mood. That kind of insight runs through the whole book, gradually coalescing into a design philosophy arrived at over a career — one that treats every decision as equally deliberate.
Between chapters, she inserts a focused essay — on Hedging, Form, Umbels, Color, Circulation, Layering, and Juxtaposition — that steps back from the specific garden space to examine the principles driving it.
She writes with enough specificity, plant names, structural decisions, and seasonal trade-offs that the book functions as something a working gardener can actually learn from.”
Herman comes out of the English garden tradition but gardens in New England, and she’s candid about the friction between those two things — the short season, the different light, the plants that simply won’t cooperate. She writes with enough specificity — plant names, structural decisions, seasonal trade-offs — that the book functions as something a working gardener can actually learn from. She also attends to the sensory life of the garden: the sound of moving water, the scent of a shrub in flower, the texture of a leaf — treating each as a design decision as considered as any hedge or hardscape. It’s the kind of attention that only comes from living somewhere for a long time, and it’s well worth observing.
A MOMENT IN TIME: DESIGNING A COUNTRY GARDEN, from Rizzoli New York. Principal photography by Neil Landrino
Available from The Rizzoli Bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound.