The Sustainable Garden - No.4 - Design Tips (part 1)
Developing some kind of plan, or roadmap, at the outset is a good starting point. The thought of ‘designing’ may be daunting to many people but breaking things down into simple steps and focusing on practical aspects can get you a long way. And the design ‘rules’ that apply to a sustainable garden are largely the same as for any garden.
This article, and the one that follows, is in fact not specifically about designing sustainably, it is about designing any garden. Many of the rules and principles that apply are the same no matter what you want. Either way, to get the most out of your garden its helpful to have some understanding of these, with the best way to think about them as simply guidelines.
‘I’m not creative’ is one of those assumptions many people carry through life, like ‘I’m can’t do maths’, perhaps because someone told them that long ago. The fear of creativity is fueled by a certain mysteriousness and lack of any apparent method, but most people are more creative than they think and in fact many elements of design can be learnt.
Anyone can therefore design. In fact, most people do, more often than they think, without even knowing. It’s true that some have a gift for it and can take it to another level but the bedrock of design is practicality, with logical steps to follow.
The purpose of this article is to take some of the mystery away, highlight some aspects of the process and offer some specific ideas that you can apply to your garden.
Less is more
Well-designed gardens are generally not filled with lots of stuff. Keeping things simple will make it easier to create a coherent and pleasing space, so one of the first things to do is deciding on the essence of what you and cutting your wish list down.
The first challenge is settling on what to do with your garden. There are so many options and we are bombarded with ideas from magazines, books, websites and TVs. When we turn to our garden it is easy to shrink into inaction, not knowing where to start.
Look though at almost any well-designed object or space and one thing is usually apparent – it is surprisingly simple. There are few distractions from the main purpose, shape and aesthetic.
We must therefore edit our wishes for the garden (sometimes brutally!), focus on the most important things to us and pare back the rest. For a number of reasons we can’t have everything we want, not least because that would result in a physically cluttered, visually chaotic and mentally unsettling space. What we really want is a beautiful garden and that’s not about ‘stuff’.
A garden is more than the sum of its parts, more than a collection of things, and simplicity, subtraction rather than addition, will help bring clarity and calmness. In design terms this is often referred to as ‘harmony’ or ‘unity’. The space feels good because there is not too much going on, competing for your attention, and it has an identity or character that is subtly suggested perhaps by the repetition of just a few elements, such as a colour or type of plant.
Form and function
Good design relies on the finished product both working well (function) and looking nice (form). The less ‘designery’ aspects of a garden – its practical elements – play a huge role in making it come together, and arguably are more important than the more obviously creative bits.
You may or may not have heard the expression ‘form and function’. It is considered a fundamental tenet of design and basically says that good design involves both aesthetics (looking nice) and practicalities (working well). So, if something looks beautiful but doesn’t fulfil the function for which it is intended then it is badly designed, and visa versa.
Practical aspects of the garden therefore play a huge role in determining it’s design. Thinking clearly and logically about the garden’s ‘function’ will go a long way to satisfying at least one side of the design equation.
However, I would go a step further and suggest thinking of it as a variation of the 80:20 rule (where 20% of the effort often achieves 80% of the desired result). Perhaps as much as 80% of your garden’s design can be satisfactorily achieved from considering the practicalities, with the last 20% coming from ‘creativity’ (the ‘form’ part of the equation).
What are the practicalities you need to consider, and how will they impact the layout of your garden? Much of it is obvious, and will no doubt have occurred to you, but is no less important for that:-
• Where does the sun hit the garden – morning, afternoon & evening, and at different times of year? – determining the spot for sunny siting areas, sun loving plants or the veg garden, or conversely the spot for a shady sitting area, woodland style planting etc.
• What are the lines of sight and movement in and out of the house? to suggest the position of paths, focal points and transitional spaces between house and garden.
• What views are there beyond the garden? in need of screening with planting or trellis, or to be emphasized by sight lines from house or terrace, and/or framed by trees or hedging.
• What views into the garden create privacy issues? which might indicate the positioning of screening or where not to place a sitting area.
• Is the garden exposed to wind from any particular direction? indicating where to create a shelter belt of planting or where not to place a terrace or sensitive planting (including veg).
• Where is the most convenient place for the bins? requiring access both to/from the back door and to/from the front of the house.
• Is there room for a shed and where is the best place? again, suggesting lines of movement and perhaps positioning of screening (although a shed can be a beautiful thing we want to look at).
Plotting all this information on a piece of paper (roughly to scale if possible), using dotted lines, arrows, colour-coded areas and labels, will begin to suggest a shape for the garden – where the open spaces of terraces and lawns should be, where the height of trees and hedging is needed, where wider expanse of planting will work and where linking paths and sight lines will make sense.
Getting connected
Each part of the garden must be linked to the whole, and the relationship between the garden and both the house and the world beyond must also be considered. It is important that there is a logic and rational underpinning your design.
The garden is not an island, isolated and disconnected from its surroundings. And equally, every little part within the garden is related to the rest of the garden. Everything should be linked, one way or another - visually, aesthetically, practically, logically - so that the whole garden makes sense.
This idea of integration can be broken down into three main categories:-
• Garden and house - The garden is an extension of our living space so the two need to feel connected. Practically, in terms of ease of access and movement between the two, physically by structures such as walls, gates, arbours, hedges and plants, linking the two and visually with lines of sight from inside the house extending out into the garden, for instance to a feature or focal point, or repeated colors, objects or plants that draw the eye.
• Garden with garden - No element of the garden should feel random or out of place. It must relate to its surroundings, mostly strongly with the things closest of course. Paths, edging, hedging, and repeated features are just a few ways to link, both literally and by suggestion, across the garden. Constantly ask yourself the question ‘why this, here?’ While the answer might include ‘I thought it looked nice’ there should also be more to it……a reason that relates to the overall design such as being a focal point from the kitchen sink, blocking a view of the neighbours shed, directing movement through the garden etc..
• Garden with surroundings - How strongly you want your garden to relate to its surroundings with depend on where you garden. Broadly, town gardens are more inward-looking while country gardens may benefit from views that can be ‘borrowed’. The main point is simply to consider how this relationship works, not assume that nothing beyond your boundary is irrelevant to the feel and shape of your garden, and then managing that to your best advantage.
Structure
The framework that holds a garden together needs to be well defined. It should still have a strong presence in winter that will provide shape and interest. In the summer this structure will be less obvious as plants come to life but its importance remains, albeit just more subtly.
The backbone of a well-designed garden is structure - a framework for the rest of the garden to hang off. It is tempting to go straight to the detail, specific plants and colours, all the nice little touches. But while it is worth having an idea of those things, you need to take a few steps back, and build the garden up, with the final little flourishes being the icing on the cake.
What is structure in a garden? It consists of layers starting with the most solid and permanent features and finishing with small details and seasonal comings and goings.
The primary layer of structure consists of the solid 3D elements (i.e. that have both height and mass) which persist throughout the year – trees, hedging, evergreen shrubs, built elements, such as walls and pergolas, and perhaps even strong ornamental features such as large urns and all season furniture.
These are the elements that will create the underlying shape to the garden, visually dominant in winter, when all else has faded, and with a strong supporting role in summer as the garden comes to life. It is the structure that fully or partially divides the garden into different areas, that blocks or frames views, that determines sight lines and controls movement through the garden.
The next layer of structure is the 2D elements of paths and terraces, that have a strong role in the overall layout of the garden, and how the garden used.
Then there are the deciduous plants, that come and go with the seasons, providing important temporary structure, as well as floral delights, in the summer.
And finally, there is the detail. The type of furniture, the colour of the fence, the pattern in the paving, the style of the pots, the accent, or eye-catching plants, that punctuate the seasons.
The aim is for the primary structure to make the garden look good even in winter and support the rest of the garden throughout the rest of the year, so it does not just look good in summer and nothing much at other times. A good technique when considering the primary structure of your garden is to try to imagine what your garden would look like in the middle of winter under a layer of snow. Will there still be anything to see, any shape or interest?
To continue the ‘backbone’ analogy, you can think of the layers of the garden like the human body, with the skeleton (trees, hedging, walls etc.) fleshed out (with paths, terraces), then clothed (with plants) and finally accessorized (with sparkly things). Control your inner magpie until the end.
Next time – Design tips - part 2