By Elizabeth Betts Hickman
The Nashville Tennessean

Enter a new term in the lexicon of style: exterior designer.

That's what noted P. Allen Smith, noted garden designer, hands-on gardener and author, considers himself to be. He explains the term on his syndicated television program, P. Allen Smith Gardens, plus frequent reports on the Weather Channel and CBS' The Early Show.

Smith wants people to think of our home, garden, the relationship between them and the way we can enjoy our gardens and, indeed, live in them.

It's about applying the same principles we apply to our rooms - color, furnishings, accessories, walls - and apply them to gardens.

Smith's 100-by-150-foot garden around his home in Little Rock, Ark., is tiny, as he puts it, but still divided into nine garden rooms.

His plantings screen his home from the street and also provide glimpses of pretty vistas for everyone to enjoy from the sidewalk. His vegetable garden provides produce for his kitchen, his roses lend blooms for the house, and plenty of areas encourage sitting, lingering or gathering friends.

But it didn't happen overnight. In fact, his book, P. Allen Smith's Garden Home (Clarkson Potter; $29.95), details the process of Smith moving his old house onto a large lot in a historic district in 1989 and making the garden from scratch.

The photos that show his garden's beginning are instructive, because they show the changes over time and how tiny shrubs and stark walkways matured into tight, glossy hedges and fluffy loads of colorful blooms.

"I'm not into making trophy gardens," he says. "Gardening is about the process and getting into the process. ... It is a lifestyle."

And that means garden rooms are to be lived in as much as possible.

"Just relax, embrace your own personal style and have fun with it," he says, but with a caveat.

"You have to have a firm hand in the beginning," he says, adding that an underlying structure or framework to a garden is critical. "If you don't take a firm or strong hand in the beginning, what results over time is a mess."

While Smith loves looking at and learning from masterful English gardens and the gardeners who create them, he says these places reveal principles that can be gathered and applied to smaller spaces.

"Extract from those grand gardens the essence of what made them work," he says. "What makes them work will make my garden work and will make your garden work."

As a teacher, Smith wants people to copy his ideas and learn how pleasant it can be to be in balance with nature and the outdoors.

"What I'd like for them to do is use it as a springboard," he says of his ideas, adding that if he recommends a plant or a combination, he's tried it before himself. "I'm not about 'This is the model. Follow it exactly or you're a failure.'

"Some other person's ideas of perfect is no way to live a life or design a garden."