Principles of Garden Design, Part II

Well, I had some nice comments, so here's part two!

Unity and Harmony
Sylvia Crowe says that there are two ways of bringing unity into a garden: through limitation of materials and through strength of purpose.

Limitation of materials is an easy one to understand. It’s achieved through matching hard landscaping to the house or by repetition of form or colour or planting.

Strength of purpose is a bit more difficult. It involves analysis - what’s the garden for, what response are you trying to get from people in your garden – is it calm, is it exciting? It’s probably one of the hardest principles to restrain enthusiastic clients to as well when they want a Japanese bit and a deck and some crazy paving and a water feature, etc. etc.
So for me this garden – Rofford Manor – works because it’s gone for a calm theme, used green almost to make the hard landscaping out of, reflecting the green walls of the house, with the green box edging to the pool – almost architectural features in the humps around the edge. I believe Michael Balston was the designer on this site.

Here’s a shot where we’ve got unity even though there are several materials present – the brick ties it all together on the path, the steps and the plinth. This is East Ruston Old Vicarage in Norfolk – described as a Sissinghurst for the 21st century. Some bits are traditional in style, others are more modern, but the areas are divided into different rooms which are individually unified.

Another design buzz-word for you here - I’m sure you everyone knows the term “focal-point” which we’d apply to the vase – we call the effect demonstrated here “enframement” where a focal point has been framed by something. There’s another term “focal-picture” which you’d apply to a collection of elements forming a complete composition.

This is another area of the same garden where they also have this fabulous meadow – unified planting on a large scale perhaps! Though you shouldn’t get too romanticised a view of meadows – this is what it looks like in spring – they plough and re-seed it every year!
Just to show I have learned something since being a student here’s an example of a garden I built shown in a quick run through. Yes, this is the before picture. A house up in the Chilterns where the vernacular architecture is brick and flint. I got called in in the January when the house looked like this and I was asked to put the garden in for the wedding in June. The clients wanted a very traditional instant planting to match the colours of the bridesmaids’ dresses.
This was how it looked at the start of June - three weeks to go, the house nowhere near finished so couldn't get landscapers on-site and me very nervous. 3 days before the wedding – that’s the marquee arriving!
The team hard at work planting into some of the many tonnes of Supasoil brought in to replace what the builders spoilt. It was at about this stage I realised we were going to make it! Note enormous pile of bags of chip – great way of making borders look finished…
Finished, just don't let the wedding guests walk on the turf! I chose this example to illustrate trying to match garden materials to the house. I wanted to use a flint inset in the path to pick up the house materials. The flint workers were used to building houses vertically and found it very difficult to lay flint horizontally so it took nearly two man-days to lay one square metre!

...I'd got more here, but I think this is long enough for a blog post now!