13 principles of great garden design
AKA weird things to do with your garden hose & an excuse to buy more plants
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What makes a garden beautiful?
Is there some kind of hack? A secret sauce? Nahhh. You might feel like having a beautifully designed garden is impossible, too hard, or something you only get to enjoy if you’re willing to drop thousands of $$ on landscapers, but fear not! There are a few basic things everyone can do when designing a garden to make it enchanting, inviting, mysterious and as aesthetically pleasing as any fancy-pants landscaped plot.
A well-designed garden pulls you out into its leafy depths. There are places to sit and contemplate, breakfast nooks that get the first rays of crisp morning sunlight, there's space to fling out a blanket and lie under a tree in the warm afternoon. Basically, a well-designed garden is a liveable space, as well as a useful space. I am a big advocate for creating gardens that are very liveable as well as functional because I think it makes for better gardeners.
The thing about gardening is that it never ends. There will always be more you can do, new projects to undertake. If our gardens are utilitarian spaces where we only ever go to harvest food, tend plants or water, they can become places that just feel like work and we can begin to neglect them when life gets chaotic.
If, on the other hand, we create gardens that are restful, peaceful and beautiful (as well as useful) we’ll spend a lot more time out there. And the more time you spend in your garden, the more you’ll learn about it. And the more you learn about it, the better the gardener you’ll become.
Garden design can feel like an impossibly mysterious art; something that only skilled landscape architects do well. But it doesn't have to be that difficult. The trick is to make incremental changes that you can always revise, tweak or undo if they don't work. This is how I teach myself garden design tactics, and it works.
After a decade of tinkering, here’s what works for me.
1. Design your garden from within your garden
Trying to sit down and design a whole garden layout on paper is hard. Mostly because you never actually see your garden from this vantage point. Our gardens are places we move through, both in time and in space. They will never be static images viewed from above.
If you are just starting to design your garden, it is far easier (and usually more useful) to experiment with the design on the ground itself; you can walk through newly imagined paths, see how the sun might hit a potential garden and find which spaces in the garden feel nicest to sit, eat and relax in.
To do this, all you need are a few basic materials - things like long rope (or a garden hose), salvaged bricks or pavers and a few stakes. I've used these materials repeatedly in my garden, whenever I've been seized by the urge to redesign it (so basically every day, all day). A few bricks, some rope or your garden hose can help you start to sketch the outlines of new beds or paths, simply by laying them out on the ground. A couple of big, well-placed stakes are an easy stand-in for trees, and you can shift, swap and change these outlines as much as you like until you find a layout you enjoy.
Once you have sketched your new garden design onto the garden itself, you can live with it for a few weeks to see how it feels. Use the paths you've tentatively drafted on the ground with old bricks, watch how the light moves across the garden beds you've outlined, check whether any trees are casting unforeseen shade, and start to get a gauge on whether (or not) the different elements of your garden feel cohesive.
Fleshing out your garden design with these impermanent structures removes a lot of the stress and overwhelm when you begin to build your garden. Knowing that nothing is set in stone helps you take more risks, try out more ideas and experiment, while knowing that you haven't paid some landscaper tens of thousands of dollars to concrete it all into permanency.
What's more, even when I settle on my own garden designs, I still stick with materials that are flexible and unfixed. The limestone paths that outline our garden beds are not concreted together, our paths are made of pavers and grass that can be lifted up and shifted if we want to try something new. Even our raised beds, built from old jetty timbers, are not concreted in. If we wanted to change everything, the most permanent structures we'd have to contend with are the trees.
Building a garden from materials that are ultimately flexible gives you a lot of freedom to continue adapting your garden as your plants grow and your needs change. Plus, it's fun - whoever wants a static garden layout that stays exactly the same for decades on end?
One word of caution, though: try not to let the infinite design possibilities paralyse you. At some point, the only way to create the garden of your wildest dreams is to grit your teeth, stick a shovel in the ground and plough forth (and don’t forget there’s almost nothing in the garden that is ever actually set in stone - if you don’t like it in 5 years, you can still probably change it).
2. Create garden ‘rooms’
Gardens are meant to be enjoyed, so when planning your layout it’s important to factor in spots to sit and enjoy your garden. If you’re not sure where to start, have a think about where the sun goes and give yourself:
A place to bask in the morning sun
A place to lounge in the midday shade, and
A place to enjoy the last of the afternoon sunlight
Depending on the size and level of sun/shade in your garden you may be able to get morning sun, midday shade and afternoon sun all in the one spot. If not, take some time to find the nicest parts of the garden at different points during the day, and create a space for yourself to sit and relax in every single one.
3. Build paths that lead to hidden destinations
The most inviting gardens are those that you cannot see the end of. They feel like they might ramble on forever. Winding paths that lead to hidden destinations play on our natural curiosity, drawing us further into the garden and its mysteries. One piece of advice that I learnt many years ago is: no matter where you stand in your garden, some parts of your garden should be hidden from view.
More recently I’ve learned of a similar ethos at work in the Zen garden at Ryoanji temple in Japan. This garden contains 15 stones, placed so that from any one vantage point you can only ever see 14 of the stones. The placement of the stones reminds us of our own ignorance; of the fact that we can never know absolutely everything from a single - fallible - perspective. Existential philosophy aside, it’s also a great way to make any garden - big or small - interesting, enticing and mysterious.
When laying your paths, think about how you’d like people to move through the garden. If you want to encourage relaxed ambling, use winding paths that turn off into hidden destinations. If you need to access a part of the garden for utilitarian purposes (e.g., moving a wheelbarrow to a shed) it can be more effective to use straight and efficient paths.
Remember that people will take the shortest route to a destination unless you make it impossible for them. So, if you’re building winding paths into your garden, make sure people can’t simply step over or through them and (even better) obscure the destination so they’re less tempted to cut corners and more likely to lose themselves in the greenery.
4. Use edging
I see a lot of gardens that don't have any edging. No edging means there is no clear delineation between your garden beds, pathways and grassed areas. Invariably the grass will begin to encroach on your paths and work its way into your garden beds. Without defined borders, gardens quickly take on a messy and chaotic appearance (and this is coming from someone who is a big fan of the 'wild gardens' aesthetic).
Well placed, clear borders for your paths, lawns and garden beds give you the freedom to have rambling, wild beds, filled with plants and flowers - the juxtaposition of order and chaos is beautiful.
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