Book recommendation garden planning

[superdupernova]

I'm moving to a house with a mid-size blank slate garden in spring. At the moment it has an apple tree, hedging around the edge and not much else. Can you recommend any books for designing a garden? The more illustrated plans the better!

How much maintenance do you want to do?

As luck would have it, I have the very book right beside me now. It is:

'The Complete Book of Garden Design, Construction and Planting' by: David Stevens, Lucy Huntingdon and Richard Key. I've got another smaller garden design book by David Stevens and that's more concise but very good too, which is called 'Planning a Garden'.

What you probably need is a book like this, to use for working out what you want and where; and then loads of pictures of lovely gardens - millions of image of which you can find online and in gardening magazines.