Garden Design Blog

Winter Garden Masterpieces

Kay — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:26:22 +0000

To create a masterpiece of garden art for winter, instead of going and buying a new container to house your winter bedding plants, dig around in your shed, or your attic, to see if there’s something less than perfect hanging around just waiting for its chance to shine.

Often old vases, baskets, chipped containers or elderly boxes can look like nothing much until you pile them up together to create an eclectic display of antique gems.

Fill them with violas and hardy grasses, rushes and sedums, ivy and small conifers that combine interesting textures with hardy growth and you have a really impressive set of containers at pocket money prices. If you find old copper or brass containers, or stainless steel ones, use their colours to highlight the plants inside, red works well with warm colours, while silvery shades of blue and white really complement steel, but make sure you line the containers with some bubble wrap to act as an insulator for the plants.

In addition, winter containers must drain freely, as soggy soil can rot their roots so ensure they have adequate drainage.

Brass urns courtesy of Binder of Daemons

Japanese Garden Style heals stress

Kay — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:06:49 +0000

If you have a stressful job, live in a big city, or suffer from chronic illness, a Japanese garden may actually provide you with a stress-relieving location that will help you cope with the pressures of your daily life.

This is because a Japanese garden is designed to find a way to harmonise human behaviour (creating a garden) with the calmness and serenity of nature.

The designer achieves this by using narrow streams of water, small bridges, hills and rocks to create a miniature landscape that offers harmony in a small space.

There are three classic styles of Japanese gardens: the Hill and Pond style (Chisen Kaiyu-skiki), the Flat Garden (Hiraniwa) and the most famous which is the Tea Garden (Rojiniwa) containing a pavilion in which to drink tea in a formal ceremony.

On reason the garden is so relaxing is that there can be no symmetry in it, you cannot have a square or round pond, as nature never produces perfect shapes, so the irregularities of nature are designed into the garden, and asymmetry is much more relaxing that symmetry (think for example of a picture on a wall, if it is slightly crooked it annoys us and we have to go and straighten it – if the frame was made of uneven rustic wood, we would never be able to tell if it was level or not, thus not giving ourselves the stress of perfection).

Another reason Japanese gardens help us relax and reduce our stress is the amount of emptiness they contain – open areas and ‘empty’ features such as gravel allow the mind to enter a meditative state, while western gardens that are busy with colour and shape cause it to remain focused in the present and observant.

Finally, Japanese gardens try to reflect the permanence of nature by using plants that survive and endure through the seasons – this means less work for the gardener and a sense of continuity and serenity that allows everybody entering the garden to feel the sense of centuries rather than weeks and to put a longer perspective on their current stresses.

Story themed gardens for the young at heart

Kay — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:33:45 +0000

A themed garden can save you time and money

Kay — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:19:09 +0000

Deciding on a themed garden takes the guesswork out of choosing trees, plants and garden accessories. But you need to think about the size of your garden, the size of your budget and the climate before you jump into a decision. Neoclassical or romantic, Tuscan or Asian, each garden theme has a style you can achieve by using authentic plants, replica accessories, using harmonised native plants that resemble the genuine article.

It’s the accessories or hard-landscaping that sets the tone for your garden and by getting that right, you ensure your major capital investment is in line you’re your garden style, and you can also decide how labour-intensive you want your garden to be – and that will make a big difference to your maintenance costs both in cash and person hours.

Think about how different an Asian temple or a Victorian summerhouse appear, and yet they are both garden structures of similar scale and cost – it’s the impression they give that shapes your garden’s overall style. Screening too serves an important purpose, both adding privacy and emphasising your garden’s style: solid screens seem European and ‘heritage’ while latticed screens are more oriental and modern. Colour finishes the effect – a red trellis is clearly oriental, a pale blue one French Provincial, a deep green one, British country garden.

Accessories feed the overall impression: terracotta is Mediterranean, while lacquer is Asian and stone or metal are neoclassical style. Plants become almost incidental if you get everything else right, and that’s good news if you’re not green-fingered!