The Sustainable Garden - No.5 - Design Tips (part 2)

Continued look at some guidelines and ideas for the planning stage of your garden.

Take back control

Designing is about creating the effect you want and this involves deciding how the garden is viewed and navigated. This means determining what users see, when they see it and how they get there.

Whether you like the idea or not, good design is about control, even if the end result is intended to be relaxed, informal or natural looking. In considering your gardens layout, the placing of trees & hedging, paving & paths, lawn and planting, it is up to you to determine how the garden is experienced – how you and others will navigate through it and what will be seen at each point along the way.

In your design you should therefore aim to control, as far as possible, movement and views through the garden (including from the house and beyond the garden). In doing so it is helpful to bear in mind a bit of human psychology.

Firstly, we have a subconscious need to make some sense of any space we enter, to find some order and understanding. This happens without us even knowing, and very quickly, but if we can’t find it our experience of that space can be uncomfortable and unsettling, or at least not quite the relaxing one we would like from our gardens.

One way to instill this sense of order, and something that works in any type of garden, is to have a dominant feature in any given space, which the eye will naturally fall upon. This anchor will help the viewer relax before exploring the surrounding area.

Taking this idea one step further you can think about creating a visual hierarchy, starting with the dominant feature and continuing with elements of reducing importance or impact, one subtly leading the eye to the next. This will provide the viewer with a natural route into and around the space that will feel ordered and comfortable.

As part of this, it’s important to remember that we are easily distracted. Unnecessary objects in that space, unintended glimpses of another part of the garden or views of the neighbour’s conservatory can all dilute the desired effect. Controlling the view therefore includes minimizing distractions.

A great analogy is to think about the layout of magazine pages – the designs of which have been developed for decades to take human psychology into account in order to maximise the readers engagement with the article.

It starts with a big picture. This is the dominant feature, known by newspaper designers as the Central Visual Impact (CVI). Next the eye is drawn to the big, bold headline, following by an introductory paragraph, or summary, in text smaller and less bold than the headline. Next the first paragraph of the article proper, again in reduced font size but maybe starting with a single giant letter. The article then continues in a subtly smaller font size and is punctuated with subheadings and some small images. The whole design cascades down the page from the prominently displayed to the subtle detail, gently drawing the reader in and through the article one step at a time. The same approach can be taken with the garden, or each part of it.

The second bit of psychology relates to how people move through space and the idea of desire lines. If a person wants to get from A to B but the official path meanders there via C, then unless they are physically restrained to stay on the path, for instance by a sufficiently tall hedge or wide enough border, they are likely to cut the corner and take the most direct route.

So, in a nutshell, you are setting scenes and then, by controlling movement, determining the place from which they are viewed. Around every corner in the garden, through every gap in the planting and from every window and door will be another scene to paint, emphasizing the view you want to be enjoyed while minimizing the distractions.

Another dimension

It’s important to remember the third dimension and use it to frame views, channel movement, create divisions and contain space. Without it a garden can be a bit, well, flat. In fact, gardens are perhaps unique in terms of design as they also inhabit a fourth dimension – time – and change with both the seasons and the years.

Gardens are three dimensional spaces but all too many only really manage two, at least until they reach the boundary fence. The centrifugal forces seen in a washing machine often seem to be at play, with everything flung out to edges of the garden, with just open lawn in the middle. Height, in the form of trees, tall shrubs, hedges, pergolas and internal fences or trellis, should be an important element throughout the garden, not just near the boundary.

Height gives texture to an otherwise flat surface, it helps to contain space, bring human scale to the garden and provides a link between earth and sky. All of which will help make the space both more interesting and more comfortable.

One reason the washing machine effect is so powerful takes us back to the idea we discussed in Design tips (part 1) – that of linking the garden together, with itself, with the house and with its surroundings. We instinctively cling to the fences like a castaway to a raft, fearful of entering the wide open expanse of the interior because there is nothing to crasp there, and we are unsure how to make the connections. The pull of the fence is therefore strong.

The reason most commonly used to justify this effect though is usually something else. What we tell ourselves and others, is that this arrangement makes best use of the full extent of the garden, makes it feel bigger and lets us enjoy the whole space.

However, while this may sound plausible it is not really true. In fact, thinking in 3D and bringing height into the garden will add another dimension, beyond the third. The effect of a wide open expanse, with all the garden boundaries on view, is that the moment we step out the back door we are aware of its entirety and, crucially, its limits. We immediately know everything about the garden, there is nothing left to discover and no scope to imagine. And the role of day dreaming in the garden should not be underestimated!

By bringing height into the garden you will create hidden corners to be discovered, a little mystery beyond and even perhaps some uncertainty about the extent of the garden. On this last point, far better to cover the fences entirely so that physical barriers do not restrict the minds freedom to roam. Even in a small garden, perhaps with a false gate attached to the wall, the impression of more beyond can create an enticing effect.

Design principles

I have sought not to address ‘design principles’ – the general rules that can be applied to all design – as abstract ideas but instead touch on them in a discussion about guidelines more specifically related to gardens. It’s worth though mentioning one or two directly.

Balance

The idea of balance in a garden refers to the ‘visual weight’ of objects in it, and whether they are arranged in a way that feels comfortable and stable. This perhaps sounds like a strange concept but it is in fact something that most people have an instinctive sense of.

The simplest, and most obvious, example is a formal garden where great emphasis is given to symmetry. This obviously creates visual balance because it is identical on both sides.

Asymmetrical balance is harder to define, but with a little consideration combined with our instinct it is something we can learn to judge. For example a garden that has all the planting on one side and just lawn on the other will feel unbalanced. But place an arbour and a tree, for example, on the other side of the lawn and balance may be achieved. Instinctively we ascribe a visual weight to the tall compact tree and arbour that is comparable to the board low expanse of planting. This is something you can easily practice by looking at any garden, or even landscape, and considering how balanced it looks and feels.

Black and white

There is another way to think about balance and that is in terms of contrast. Having contrasting elements - tall and short, light and shade, rough and smooth – is a vital way to create interest. But how much contrast is a question of balance. Too little contrast and the result may be dull and unstimulating, too much will tip the scene from interesting to busy or confused. This is also linked with the idea above of controlling the narrative and creating a hierarchy of visual interest - too much stuff competing for your attention will confuse and distract from the main scene.

Contrast can be found everywhere – smooth paving to rough gravel path, round leaf to spikey leaf to feathery leaf, colours of foliage or objects, the shape and height of plants, flat painted wall to textured hazel hurdle, light and shade, and open space compared to ‘solid’ space (sometimes known as mass & void – the idea that empty space is needed to balance and contrast with filled space).

Use of contrast is linked with the ‘less is more’ idea discussed at the start. In paring back your wish list, identifying some interesting contrasts, without overdoing it, and balancing these out with some subtle repeated themes, such as plants, objects or colour, that pull things together in a coherent and pleasing way.

Scale

This is where the analogy of the Room Outside works so well, making spaces that are designed with our own size in mind, like the rooms of our house – garden furniture is obviously made to human scale, so should the rest of the garden. Obviously the bigger your garden the harder it becomes to maintain human scale. But by creating a series of spaces that start with cosy rooms near the house and, via a series of intermediate spaces, ends up with more expansive garden landscapes, this transition can be managed.

One useful tip to remember is that objects placed in small spaces do not necessarily want to be small. Overall the space still needs to be appropriate for human scale. The temptation can be to overcompensate for size and end up scaling everything down too much. In the same way you wouldn’t think of miniaturizing furniture in a small garden, so too features such as pots, water features and specimen plants should still be kept sufficiently large to have the desired impact. To allow for the small amount of space available, it is better to reduce the number of things in it than the size of those things.

The final word

So, there are many ideas to help design a garden. If there are perhaps two things to keep in mind overall they are these. Firstly - and this is linked to the idea that a garden is more than a collection of things, that ‘less is more’ – it is that a garden is largely about mood and atmosphere. Try to imagine how you want the garden to make you feel when you are sitting in it, or looking at it from the house, and then consider what are the things that might engender that feeling.

Secondly, developing a garden is a process not an event. Gardens change with the seasons and years and seeking to ‘finish’ the garden can add undue pressure - far better to go with the flow and let things evolve. Aim for 80% and accept the rest as work in progress.

Next time – Reduce, reuse & recycle – to borrow a well-established saying