On the Bookshelf > Creating Home Outside

Home improvement isn’t something that only takes place inside—there’s lots we can do to make the outdoor spaces surrounding our homes more aesthetically pleasing, inviting and comfortable. For inspiration, New Hampshire Home has turned to Julie Moir Messervy, who will speak about the subject at the next installment of the magazine’s Celebrity Lecture Series on April 23.

Creating a unique and personal landscape is the focus of Messervy’s fourth and latest book, Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love, which was published in February by the Taunton Press. “My goal with this book is to help people realize the pleasure that’s involved in being out of doors,” Messervy says. “I want to revive the home landscape as a place of importance and source of pleasure in people’s lives.” Her Web site, jmmds.com, has more information about her work.

Messervy’s study of garden design in Japan spawned her belief that “form follows feelings about spaces.” One of her goals for her new book is to “give homeowners a language so that they can express those feelings to landscape architects and designers.”

Messervy, who is principal of Julie Moir Messervy Design Studio in Saxtons River, Vermont, has been designing landscapes for more than thirty years. She has won awards from the Association for Professional Landscape Designers and the American Horticultural Society; lectured at the Smithsonian Institution and Getty Museum; been a contributor to Fine Gardening magazine; and appeared on public television’s the Victory Garden.

In 1999, Messervy completed the award-winning Toronto Music Garden, which was a collaboration with renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the City of Toronto to create a three-acre public park based on the “First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello” by J. S. Bach. Her next project is creating a Garden of Forgiveness in Rwanda.