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Designing: The Inviting Landscape

 
Our spring is taking her own sweet time turning on the lights and opening the door.  Was it not amazing to be outside in the 77 degree weather on Sunday without so much as a bud showing green on any woody plant?  A hoticultural twilight zone is what we have going on now.  That day, my tulips at home breached the surface of the ground, and went on to grow up 4 inches.  They are ready to get going-just like every gardener I know.  If you have issues with your landscape, I am sure you are wringing your hands over which way to go.  What lane will you choose?   

The very first order of business is to think long and hard about what you want your landscape to do for you.  There are lots of choices.  It could provide refuge from a frenetic world or a stressful job.    It could provide an environment for your kids to play.  It could be a laboratory for your tinkering; growing this plant from seed or nurturing that 3″ hellebore seedling can be incredibly rewarding.  Teaching your kids how to grow beans and potatoes-this has to be equally rewarding.  It could provide your family with home grown food. It could satisfy your longing for roses, or your lust for geometry. It could enclose you, provoke you, challenge you, amuse you, or knock you over.  How do you know what you want, and what you need?  Make a list, and edit.  Throw out all the 3 rated wants, and focus on the 8, 9, and 10 rated wants. This essay intends to address only one want-an inviting landscape.  The soft, fluid, and colorful landscape pictured above-inviting.  

Landscapes that invite provide places to be, and places to sit.  Places to linger, places to talk.  Engaging places.  Inviting landscapes accomodate company.  Though this picture says much about structure-a table, a bench, the geometry implied in a series of espaliers in lead pots, what engages the eye the most are the flowers.  Flowers soften structures in friendly way. 

Pots at the back door say first up-here is the door.  Secondly, they say hello, and welcome.  This landscape without the pots would be fairly austere.  Though glass permits a view through, glass in the landscape is not transparent-it reads black from outside.  Should you wish your landscape to invite, soften the appearance of that black glass as best you can.    

A walkway asks for a landscape of interest on both sides.  Avoid a walk with a garden on one side, and lawn on the other.  This makes a walk a border, rather than an experience. Lawn has its place.  Lawn that is utilitarian, and has a beautiful shape is as muich a part of the landscape as the trees.  Treat your guests to a garden tour before they get to the door.   A welcoming landscape encourages guests to arrive at the front door, smiling. 

Terraces are a hard surface of a certain dimension  laid on the ground plane.  They make for a surface that is navigable.  Though stone, brick and gravel are hard surfaces, they are natural surfaces.  They make it easy for groups to congregate.  Your son’s softball team and all of the attending parents, a fundraiser attracting lots of guests, a neighborhood group coming for lunch, a graduation party with friends and family-a terrace gives every guest a firm footing.  Beyond that, a terrace can be landscaped such that people feel welcome.  When I sit down on a terrace, I want plants at eye level.  This makes me feel comfortable, and welcome. 

Some very contemporary landscapes make much of what I would call an immature and shallow call to the idea of alienation.   As if alienation were a goal a gardener should seek. Nature portrayed as alienated-oh please. Nature is involved up close in the lives of all of us.  Great geometry-I am on board with this idea.  Want to make your modern  landscape inviting-introduce a plant element that waves in the breeze.  Great modern landscapes can be as inviting as any cottage garden-just different. Clean, clear, and in motion; this modern terrace is inviting.   

This established landscape is all about providing a comfortable place for friends and family to congregate.       


This new landscape is just about ready for those softening elements that will make this space inviting.

Posted on: April 12, 2011 2 Comments
Filed Under: Landscape Design Tagged With: ,

Black And White

Looking out the window yesterday, I was crushed by what I saw.  Snow falling at a rapid rate.  Nor did it quit-hours later there was still snow falling.  Wouldn’t you think that after all the snow we have had in the past 5 days, that nature would be out of snow?  Are not the snow reserves in the upper atmosphere completely depleted?  Is nature not exhausted from her nation wide, days long snow and ice dump, and needing to scale back, or take a nap, or something?  Is she not getting a little bored with all the white everywhere, and thinking to switch on some other type of weather?  Change the channel, maybe?  I have places where the 30 inch tall boxwood has a snow top hat over 36 inches tall.  Yes, the snow came spectacularly wrapped in a wind package.     

It’s not as though I have no tolerance for winter weather-after all, this is my 60th winter in this zone.  But the volume of snow we have had has wrought a remarkable change in the landscape.  That every crisp angle and shape is blurred-an ordinary consequence of the Michigan winter.  But the volume of white in the landscape is making every other still struggling to survive color go black.  I can always tell when the temperatures get very cold-my yews at home will go black green.  Today they make a black hedge with a few white specks.  Boxwood is a lighter green color-this boxwood has gone black from the sheer volume of white engulfing it.  In spite of my exasperation with the current weather,  I am noticing that the extreme contrast between black and white is painting a graphically stark and pared down picture of the design of the landscape.      

Perhaps the very best time to look at whether the design of a landscape is working is when it is reduced to its black and white bones.  Every sculpture, pot, fence or other inanimate object has a shape that is unmistakable.  The shape and size of this brown pot makes a far stronger statement than its surface decoration.  When I look at pots for a specific spot, I consider the shape and proportion first, and its color or surface decoration second.  The most gorgeous pot in the world will not look like it-placed in the wrong spot.  I am getting a lot of visual help from the snow here.  It blankets the ground, and every other horizontal surface.  There is no grass, water, flowers, dog toys, bugs, leaves or birds to distract me. I can see the form, as it is all that is there to see.  I suddenly realize why people photograph objects with a white background.  To better see the object, yes?  It may be that the ability to design has something to do with being able to see like this-in spite of all the extraneous noise.  Winter is an incredibly quiet time in a garden, in more ways than one.            

These wirework plant stands have details that could be lost, depending on how they are planted. The round shape will persist no matter what-making them a great choice where they can be viewed in the round.  Against a flat wall seems like a less than optimal placement for this piece.  I can clearly see the relationship of the round object to the straight wall of an iron fence.  Celebrating what an object does best means looking long and hard at that object, and its relationship to a place.  A fence creates an implacably strong shape and visual direction.  Perhaps that is why serpentine walls and brush fences are so visually compelling.  They are so unlike our intellectual idea of a fence.  Trees planted close together so as to make a fence is an unexpected experience of a tree.     

The placement, shape and mass of every object in a landscape-live or not creates visual relationships.  Symmetrical relationships are calming, orderly and dignified.  Asymmetrical relationships are dynamic, fluid, rhythmic. These concrete pots at the shop were placed to make efficient use of the space in which they are stored-not to look beautiful. The snow is so deep, the true shapes are obscured.  The rectangle in the foreground is buried in snow.  All I can really see here is the relationship of the black shapes to the white shapes.  That relationship makes a description of depth.  The mass of white in the foreground narrows to a ribbon of white that moves back in space diagonally to the grey- white in the far background. I see like this routinely. Seeing like this enables the ability to compose.      

Every woody plant has an overall shape.  Individual branches have their own shape, line and texture.  Now might be the best time to look at trees and shrubs, should you be looking to add one.  Should you want a dogwood worse than you need the size and shape of a dogwood, at least you know up front what the issues are; I am assuming you have covered the horticulktural bases.  Deciduous shrubs that have been pruned into balls and squares tell all on a black and white day.  You can decide if that style of pruning is what you want.  My pollarded Palabin lilacs looked beautiful this morning.  Another gardener might not warm up to that woman generated shape; natural, it is not.  


The stairs to the kitchen door are not only obliterated from view, they are buried under a drift that is amazingly deep. But the shape and the directional quality of the yews is apparent.  This hedge has panic grass planted in front of it; I never see this view in the summer.  I might some day want a different look, that does not obstruct the hedge, and its relationship to a magnolia and a kousa dogwood.  I can see what the change would look like.  More simple.  Maybe visually stronger.  Could it be that this part of my garden has so much competition for attention going on that it is not as good as it could be?

This contemporary limestone V-shaped bowl had a leftover wreath from the holidays on top.  That wreath has proved to be an excellent snowcatcher.  That snow gives me an excellent idea about what a single species summer planting might grow up to look like.  It furthermore tells me that if I plant every plant vertically, rather than turning the rootballs of the outermost plants outward, I will end up with a stiffly vertical mature shape.  Is this what I would want?   It also tells me that a minimally trailing plant will best illustrate and preserve the view of the geometry of the pot. 

My picea mucrunulatum came with the house; they were planted on either side of my front walk.  As I know them to be slow growing, and wider rather than tall, I moved them both to a spot on the drive where they had plenty of room to grow and mature without restriction.  I never do one thing to them-except look at them.  That was a good move.  This black and white day reminds me what a beautifully complex texture they have. 

Cardigan welsh corgis have very short legs.  Milo’s might be 8 inches long.  The snow depth is much more trouble for Milo than for me, but he is good natured about it.  Corgi cum rabbit, he is these days.  His only complaint is that I am reluctant to follow him out there.  I finally had to get out there-before he completely disappeared.  The overnight forecast?  More snow.

Posted on: February 6, 2011 Leave a Comment
Filed Under: Holiday, Garden Ornament, Good Design Tagged With: , ,

Sunday Opinion: A Sense Of Balance

The idea of balance in design is intimately related to our physical understanding of balance.  At the conclusion of an event some years ago, I stupidly decided to avoid the long route to my car via the lighted sidewalk, and cut through an intervening landscape bed.  In the dark,  I stepped directly into an unexpected drainage ditch set 18 inches below grade.  Loosing my balance, I went down hard and sideways-my unfortunately high heeled  foot hit the steel drainhole cover at an impossible angle, and I crashed to the ground.  The stress of the bad landing left me with a broken leg.  Every day for the ensuing ten weeks I had every reason to think about the importance of balance.  I never did master the art of dragging the hose weighty with water up the two steps to my upper deck-while on crutches.  I could not balance my cup full of coffee in my hand, and still hold the crutch-I did not have enough fingers.  I had to move my coffee pot from the kitchen to my desk.  As my house sits up high, negotiating the stairs while on crutches proved particularly nerve wracking; no doubt I was unstable on my feet, and fearful of falling.  It was not until I was able to ditch the crutches that I regained my sense of equilibrium; my bilateral symmetry was restored.  This is a fancy way of saying I had back a functional leg on each side of me, and my center of gravity.   The day that I was again securely balanced was a very good day.  I still loose my balance on occasion; I cannot focus on anything up close without my reading glasses.  When I forget I am wearing them, and start to walk somewhere, my inner sense of balance vanishes; this is not a pleasant sensation. 

The idea of balance in design falls into two broad categories.  Symmetrical design, in which every element left of center is matched equally with identical and  corresponding elements right of center, is visually very stable.  Of course landscape is a sculpture one views in the round, so the symmetry always applies to a particular view.  Choosing which view will be the dominant view should come early in the design process.  It is just as important to identify the center of any given view.  The degree to which a design is symmetrical, and therefore completely stable, determines its formality.  A composition symmetrical from every view is very formal. Very formal landscapes laid out on visual axis have an equilibrium such that your eye moves around the composition, and eventually comes to rest. Those clients for whom an atmosphere that is serene is important usually gravitate towards formally balanced landscapes.  

As people are visually completely familiar with the appearances of the human figure and face, a symmetrical arrangement that is out of square, or balance, can be spotted instantly.  I have installed formal landscapes where I have had a surveyor lay out a swimming pool, or landscape beds in an effort to be sure every line perpendicular to a residence is as perfectly perpendicular as possible, and likewise every horizontal line is as closely horizontal as one could manage.  The science of generating these lines involves checking and rechecking one’s measurements.  A tree planted out of vertical is instantly apparent as such.  If it is not the deliberate intent of the design to introduce a skewed line, then the appearance of that tree will always be irritating.  A swimming pool installed out of square is a problem not easy to solve.

Landscapes can just as easily be asymetrically balanced, but this is more complicated, and requires more skill.  Asymmetrical compositions are not at rest; angled lines are very active visually.  The excitement of it all asks for a keen sense of balance.  As Vita de Sackville West is reputed to have said, “It isn’t that I don’t like sweet disorder,. but it has to be judiciously arranged.”  The relationship of a massive evergreen to the shape and size of the groundcover bed underneath it speaks to establishing a sense of visual balance.  The placement of one large element can be balanced by a number of smaller elements placed elsewhere in such a way that a pleasing relationship is made. A diagonally planted mass of light colored foliage plants in the horizontal plane can be balanced by a single tall dark vertical plant. Asymmetrically curving beds relate to each other via the shape of the lawn, walk, or path between them. A driveway approaching a house on an angle needs a balancing counterpart to provide the eye with the directions about where to go next, or that eye will fall off the edge of the composition.  Some visually compelling element placed to direct the eye from one place to the next provides an active view with a stable rhythm. I like a good beat.  A driveway with a giant landscape bed on one side, and lawn on the other appears lopsided. A house placed asymetrically on a piece of land asks for a landscape to balance all that visual weight concentrated off kilter; properly done, the relationship of house to landscape can be as pleasing as it is exciting. 

An informal landscape is not a justification for a landscape lacking design. Once while installing a landscape, I had a chance to observe an identical activity taking place across the street.  Trucks arrived with plants, the plants were placed in order as they came off the truck, and planted.  At the last, beds were cut around the plants.  Some curving lines had glaringly flat spots.  Some beds curved inward too close to the trunk of a tree, and then curved outward where no plants were planted-resulting in big barked areas. I saw no one checking any views; I did see trees placed dead center on windows. I have seen other very informal landscapes perfectly balanced in its color, texture, proportion and mass; it was clear a very skilled person was driving the design process.

The choice one makes as to the formality and symmetry of a landscape design is just that-a choice.  I like them both, equally.  My landscape at home is very formal and bilaterally symmetrical, as that is what gives me what I need, and what pleases me.  This does not prevent me from admiring other differently designed spaces, or designing informally for a client whose love of line is anything but horizontal and vertical.  I just like to see that moves in a landscape get made deliberately and thoughtfully.  By design. 

However,  I am also exposed to plenty of landscapes where I cannot sense the design idea behind it, but the plants are lovingly cared for.  Some might lack for plants, but the lawn is mowed and the yard neat.  There are others in which the gardens are weeded, the trash is picked up, the garbage cans, lawnmowers, rowboats, children’s toys and bikes are not part of the public view. There are flowers at the door-though that door might be painted lavender to match a set of lavender shutters. Neat, clean, and well-tended,  on purpose.  These landscapes balance me; they help keep me from tripping, and falling over from my own design obsessed foolishness.

Posted on: November 1, 2009 3 Comments
Filed Under: Strictly Opinion, Landscape Design Tagged With: , ,

October Light

Oct 25 012The fall is the perfect time to talk about light as an element of design in the landscape. How, when and where the sun shines, dramatically influences the visual impact of any landscape or garden.  October light in Michigan is cold and low in the sky. Uneven or carved surfaces are cast in sharp relief. Any shadows cast will be dramatically elongated.  A client choosing a smooth surfaced ornament for their garden should be happy for a subtle light rendering; if not, choosing ornament with some more graphic surface variation might be in order.

Oct 25 029I could write on into the next decade about how light is the engine that gets  any outdoor space moving.  One of my favorite parts of my Michigan gardening life is how the light can make the appearance of everything change, from hour to hour, and day to day, and season to season. The contrast of light and dark in a garden is its heartbeat.  In October, the trees coloring up are all the more dramatic for  the ignition supplied by that intensely pale light.  Its worth thinking about the degree of shade a tree or shrub will cast in a landscape.  A densely shady area is all the more dramatic with a pocket pool of light behind it. Plan for dark spaces close to your view, with light spaces in the distance.   

Oct 26 010The spring leaves emerging on my Princeton gold maples cannot hold a candle to their yellow fall fire. I am a photographer whose lack of  understanding about the mechanics of photography is considerable.  So I watch the light.  When it suffuses every element in a garden such that the color in my pictures, or the feeling of my pictures,  will be saturated-that is the time I photograph. I record; I do not have the skills to generate. It is hard to believe this collection of  these maple yellow leaves produces such dense shade underneath; the grey cedar fence appears black by way of contrast, and almost disappears.

Oct 25 025Our thin rod steel spheres permit the view of your choice through to the landscape. How they interact with a garden is the best part about them.  Imagine this view in the winter, the early spring, the early summer, the high summer, the fall; you get the idea. Add light to the mix, and your possible visual combinations increase considerably.  Garden ornament interests me greatly, given how it offers me a sense of solidity, and steadfast longevity, against the ever changing landscape. 

Oct 25 037The bright flat October sun sets all it touches on fire.  The greens are all that much more electrically green; the reds glow red. If you are looking to see the rhythm established by the masses of light and dark in your landscape, look quick now before the leaves fall. There is instruction coming from the natural world every day, should you care to tune in.

Oct 25 043The color of these pansies speaks softly in the spring.  The fall light intensifies and electrifies the appearance of their color.   On my best days, I think about how the light will fall on a landscape in every season, as this should  influence how I place every plant or object.

 Oct 27a 006

No annual or perennial in my garden has color quite like this.  It interests me that at the moment the color of the leaves of this Boston ivy flares brightly, the leaves are also beginning to decompose.  Life and death inextricably intertwined. Though my idea of hell places me in a history of philosophy classroom, I have no problem walking outside, and observing what is going on. Oct 27a 004

Those brightly cold moments in October forecast the dormant season on the way. The light is bluish; it throws everything silhouetted against it black. The soft grey of the bark of my lindens reads flat black in the fall.  It’s the quality of the light transforming a landscape you thought you knew,  into something you have not seen before.

Oct 25 046
This cabbage leaf shed from its plant is plastered on the concrete in a fall rain.  The cool light records the dropping of the leaves; it takes you and I to wake up and see it.  The smooth green stem gone a grief stricken  pale grey reads graphically against the wet dark pavement.  This is a different version of October light.

Oct 26 017
This last stage of the flowers of my hydrangeas, bathed in October light-so beautiful. Maybe more beautiful than the height of their bloom.  They look so dignified, as they gracefully dry, quietly accepting the closing of the season. The October light makes an operatic production of this process, does it not? I would encourage you-see the light.

Posted on: October 27, 2009 2 Comments
Filed Under: Landscape Design, Good Design, The Natural World Tagged With: ,