The Beginning Landscape is the shortest section, and the most important. It is just 72 pages long, yet it contains the Lernscaping Checklist, information on design principles, learning about your site, how to draw a plan, testing and preparing your soil, finding ideas, hiring professionals, acquiring the plants and maintenance guidelines. Joel Lerner's 42 years of designing and lecturing experience are distilled into a beautifully simple consideration of all the important points in decision making. If this was all there was to the book, it would still be a great one.
The other three sections of the book are the supporting help. The Practical Landscape looks at the various possibilities for any given landscape problem such as disability access, pet areas, screening and noise abatement, security and safety and even meeting a budget.
The Constructed Landscape discusses what you need to know about choosing and planning for the fences, walks, arbors, driveways, pools, decks, sculpture and more that you will want in your landscape.
Finally, the Well-Planted Landscape discusses plants and planting. This is necessarily the weakest part of the book, though it is very good on the points of selection, preparation and maintenance. The problem is, this book is useful all over the country, and the list of plant material cannot be long enough to do justice to the whole USA. The solution is to use localized plant lists that are specific to our zone. Here is a good link for zone 4. You can browse the appendices at the back of the book to look for plants for zones 3 and 4 because they contain a very large list of plants and give hardiness zones for them, but the localized list can be searched by various criteria once you have a plan in mind and save yourself a lot of time.
Pick up a copy of this book, read the first 72 pages, and complete the Lernscaping Checklist. You will be amazed at the new insight into your personal space and the possibilities for it. You can give up those fuzzy ideas about foundation plants and shade trees and become aware of how your lifestyle should dictate your gardenstyle.
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