Inspired Gardens

Inspired Gardens

By Thomas Sammut

CONTENTSIntroduction

The Cottage Garden

The Modern Garden

The Traditional Garden

5

6

14

22

The best gardens are much more than an assortment of beautiful plants.

Successful gardens generally represent a careful integration of diverse

elements, ranging from the purely ornamental to the strictly functional.

Paths, pools, planters, arbours, fountains and fences can contribute

enormously to the creation of an exciting and vibrant garden. Made

garden features establish the “style” of the garden more definitively than

plants alone. Within this book it outlines the different styles of gardens,

that define the space in which they are designed.

INTRODUCTION

5

The Cottage GardenA Cottage garden uses an informal design, traditional materials, dense plantings,

and a mixture of ornamental and edible plants. Cottage gardens go back

many centuries, but their popularity grew in 1870s England in response to

the more structured English estate gardens that used formal designs and

massed colours of brilliant greenhouse annuals.

6

8

The romance of the cottage garden wins the hearts of many designers

across the world. This is mainly due to the dominant force of the planting,

profusion of colour, and the sheer variety of species used in this quintessentially

English style. At its best, a cottage garden uses thematic or coordinated

f lower and foliage colour within small compar tments or “rooms”, as

seen to great effect in the gardens of Sissinghurst or Hidcote Manor.

Cottage garden’s are more casual by design, depending on grace and charm

rather than grandeur and formal structure.

The earliest country gardens were far more practical than their modern

descendants, with an emphasis on vegetables and herbs, along with some

fruit trees, perhaps a beehive, and even livestock. Flowers were then

used to f ill any spaces in between. Over time, f lowers became more

dominant within the garden. Modern day cottage gardens include

countless regional and personal var iations of the more traditional

English cottage garden.

9

The layout of a cottage garden should be simple and geometric, yet many

diverge from this pattern into more idiosyncratic twists and turns, especially as

the design moves further away from the house where wilder planting dominates.

Pathways are often narrow, so that the plants partially obscure a clear way through.

This romantic planting softens the appearance of a garden, and brings

you into close contact with scent, foliage textures, and spectacular blazes

of colour. The paved areas are constructed from small-scale units, such

as brick, gravel, setts or cobbles, which allow mosses, lichens or creeping

plants to colonize the joints and surfaces. Simple seats, old well heads,

tanks, pumps, and local “found” materials make interesting focal points

and create a serendipitous quality, while arbours or arches decorate the

thresholds between the various garden spaces. Lawns are used, but it is

the planting beds that are considered most important. Elsewhere in the

garden, fruit and vegetable beds retain the simple geometry of the earliest

cottage gardens, with brick or compacted earth paths providing access to

these working borders.

DESIGN INFLUENCES

The modern interpretation of the

cottage garden is based to a great

extent upon the work of Gertrude

Jekyll and her architect par tner,

Edwin Lutyens. They created many

outstanding designs in the 1890s

under the auspices of the Arts and

Crafts Movement. Jekyll used local

cot tage gardens around Surrey

as the inspiration for her planting

schemes, teamed with elements

from her Mediterranean travels and

colour theories developed during

her fine art training.

Together, Jekyll and Lutyens designed

and planted enormous borders in

a luxuriant and romantic style, which

brought timeless cottage garden

qualities to the estates of some of

the wealthiest Edwardian families.

Their approach set the agenda for the

English garden over the next century.

10

Coffee.Garden.Coffee. Does a good morning need anything else? Betsy Cañas Garmon

The modern style garden has become very popular with in England in

the last 10 years. This is partly due to the increase of modern housing

with small gardens as well as the cultural shift towards contemporary

design. The Modern garden layout needs a simple, clear geometry. Planting

needs careful thought, as space is limited – the trend has been for fewer

species that work harder seasonally, providing architectural or sculptural interest.

Grasses and large-leaved foliage plants are popular with designers of this style.

A Modern Garden

14

This style of garden can be defined by the use ‘clean’ design lines, with focus

on hard landscaping materials: stone, hardwood, and rendered walls.

Planting style is bold but simple with the use of drifts of one or two plants

that repeat throughout the design.

Grasses are a very popular choice for this style of design. Lighting effects

also play an integral role in the modern garden. Subtle lighting effects can be

achieved with the use of carefully placed low voltage LED lights incorporated

into paving and walls.

16

Architectural treatments to boundary walls, furniture, and water features

create elegant “rooms”, often lit after dark to create extensions to the home.

Evocative of country gardens, early city designs were often heavily planted

and complex in layout. Today, they have become much simpler, often taking

over areas that could have been used for entertainment or play. This intensive

planting approach benef its the keen urban gardener, who may even

use the space as a productive allotment.

17

DESIGN INFLUENCES

In 1839, JC Loudon – the Scottish

botanist, garden designer and garden

magazine editor, responded to

increasing urbanization and the

diminishing size of city gardens

i n h i s book , “The Subur ban

Gardener and Villa Companion”.

In it, he classified different design

approaches to the small urban

garden, including low-maintenance

designs. More than a century later,

John Brookes published a series

of successful books that, like Loudon

before him, addressed designs

for smaller plots , and explored

the idea of the “outdoor room”.

More recently, the Japanese have

lead the way in designing tiny

outdoor spaces. In their densely

populated cit ies , balconies or

light wells are often the only areas

available for planting.

18

19

In the Western gardening tradition, a formal garden is a neat and orderly

garden laid out in carefully planned geometric and symmetric lines.

Lawns and hedges in a traditional garden must always be kept neatly clipped.

Formality demands an axis, or central line, which is the basis of the garden

plan. This could be a pathway or lawn, or even a central planting bed.

Generally, the axis focuses on a dominant feature, such as a sculpture,

statue, fountain or ornament.

A Traditional Garden

22

Formal garden design relates directly to the classical architecture of

Greece and Italy. Ordered gardens originally provided a setting for the

villas of the wealthy or powerful across Europe, echoing the symmetry

of their grand houses. Known as “power gardening”, it was seen as

the ultimate in garden-making, embodying a sense of control. Although

famous formal gardens, such as Versailles, are vast, the basic principles of

the style can be applied to gardens of any size, even tiny urban spaces,

where ordered, balanced designs work very well. Parterres, water pools,

and expanses of lawn are typical of classical formality; examples by

contemporary designers may also feature decorative borders that soften

the garden’s structure.

A French garden or Garden à la française, is a specific kind of formal

garden, laid out in the manner of André Le Nôtre; it is centered on the

façade of a building, with radiating avenues and paths of gravel, lawns,

parterres and pools (bassins) of reflective water enclosed in geometric

shapes by stone coping, with fountains and sculpture. The Garden à

la française had its origins in sixteenth-century Italian garden such as

Boboli Gardens behind Palazzo Pitti, Florence, laid out by a series of

architect designers for the Grand Duchess Eleanor of Toledo.

Hedges, vast lawns, water features, and parterres of box and cut turf, often

decorated with coloured gravel, as seen in Le Nôtre’s work, set the

tone for all formal gardens that followed, with views and perspectives

manipulated for the best theatrical effect.24

25

26

Formal gardens were a feature of the stately homes of England from the

introduction of the par terre at Wilton House in the 1630s until such

geometries were swept away by the naturalistic landscape gardens of the

1730s, but perhaps the best-known example of a formal garden of gravel,

stone, water, turf and trees with sculpture is at Versailles, which is actually

many different gardens, laid out by André Le Nôtre. In the early eighteenth

century, the publication of Dezallier d’Argenville, La théorie et la pratique du

jardinage (1709) was translated into English and German, and was the central

document for the later formal gardens of Continental Europe.

Formal gardening in the French manner was reintroduced at the turn of

the twentieth century: Beatrix Farrand’s formal gardens at Dumbarton

Oaks, Washington DC and Achille Duchêne’s restored water parterre at

Blenheim Palace are examples of the modern formal garden. New York

City’s Central Park features a formal garden in the Conservatory Garden

at the northern sector.

DESIGN INFLUENCES

Although some of the earliest Islamic gardens were formal in layout, often

divided by rills into quarters, classical and Renaissance influences have

come to define this style. The doyen of the formal garden is André Le

Nôtre, one of a long line of gardeners turned designers who found fame

in France under the reign of Louis XIV. The gardens he designed at Versailles

and Vaux le Vicomte are his most famous legacies. The false perspectives,

level changes and reflective pools of both gardens are typical of Le Nôtre’s

approach to design, which won him the affection of the King.

Symmetry about a central axis is crucial to emphasize the focus of the garden.

Planting and construction are geometric and simple, with lawn, clipped

hedges, and avenues forcing planting into order, and balustrades, steps,

terraces, and wide gravel pathways all conspiring to unify the garden space.

In it’s simplest form a formal garden would be a box-trimmed hedge

lining or enclosing a carefully laid out flowerbed or garden bed of simple

geometric shape, such as a knot garden. The most elaborate formal gardens

contain pathways, statuary, fountains and beds on differing levels.

28