Saturday, June 2, 2012

Design

It is finally time to get back to blogging about the garden.  I have decided to write about garden design, and why it is important.

When my husband and I bought our house in January 1984, I had no idea what the garden would  look like.  When it revealed itself to me in the Spring, I was both enchanted and horrified.  There were beds and borders with lovely peonies and daisies.  There were also pernicious vines studded with thorns that seemed to have wrapped themselves around the property.  I did not know what to do; I just wanted to bring order to my property.

I did not have a grand plan or an ambitious idea about transforming my yard into a prize winning space.  I really just wanted order.  Many years later, I realize that that goal was an excellent one, and I will explain why from a design point of view.

Design goals are many - create and enhance function, economy, and beauty.  I am most interested in creating and enhancing beauty in my garden.  I have discovered over the years that having an orderly garden, even if it is boring, is more beautiful than a disordered one because the eye, and thus the brain, cannot tolerate confusion for long.  The eye wants help, needs help, to decipher what is going on.  If there is not a clear sense of order, the eye is confused, and the viewer becomes anxious.

An obvious question, then, might be "why didn't you just plant beds of pink impatiens?'  Actually, that might not have looked too bad.  But I wanted more.  I wanted delphiniums, I wanted prairie-type flowers, I wanted hydrangeas.  Whenever you add variety to a design, especially an organic design, you make the design process much more complicated.  You start dealing with height, color, texture, shape, and timing issues.  The goal becomes coordinating all of these considerations into an ordered garden.  It seems like an overwhelming task. 

Design elements  in the garden include balance, repetition, pattern, scale, light and dark, color intensity, color hue, and interest.  I am first going to tackle scale and interest.

I have two large borders on my property.  The smaller of the two can be viewed from many vantage points - close, several feet away, and many feet away (20-30 feet).  This garden works best when the whole garden works as a whole.  The larger of the borders can be seen up-close, no more than 10 feet away if you are looking at it dead on, and 20-30 feet away if you are looking at it at an angle.  I will illustrate and discuss these scale considerations more fully in a subsequent blog.  I bring it up now because I want to discuss the up-close view of a section of garden.   My long border works as a whole, but it also works in sections or "rooms".  This picture shows one of these rooms in late May of this year. 

A garden season can be 12 months long.  Many novice gardeners get excited about plants in the Spring, and plant their garden with lovely early-flowering plants such as iris, cranesbill geranium, dianthus, poppies, peonies and creeping phlox.  The problem with this scheme is that the flowers stop blooming, and you are left with a green garden for most of the rest of the season.  There is a relatively simple solution to this problem; place late-flowering plants in front of early-flowering ones.  There are exceptions, which I will explore further in an up-coming post.  I will leave you with some plants that I like to plant at the front of a border, and a picture.  The plants are sedum august joy, asters, and many herbs.

Sedum august joy has been planted in front of a bearded iris clump in this photo.  After the iris have finished flowering, I can cut them back.  By that time, the asclepias tuberosa (there is a picture of this flower blooming gloriously in an earlier post) to the front left will be blooming, and the sedum will be much larger.  It took me years to figure this scheme out, despite that just about all of the garden design books mention it.  This design suggestion also makes it easier to keep an orderly garden.  Once many plants have flowered, they can look awful - think of poppies especially, but also obedient plant and monarda.  If they are placed behind yet or soon-to flower plants, you can hide or cut them back.  Order is maintained, and visual anxiety is kept at bay.  

No comments:

Post a Comment