Perennial Garden Design
I write about design every now and then and I even practice what I preach in a few bits of my overall design but on the whole, I can say with a great deal of certainty that I’ll never make the cover of a garden magazine. I have done a few things right though and as I was out walking the garden today in the post-snow sunshine, it became clear that my perennial garden design has few things going for it.
Wide Beds
To begin with, the flower beds are wide enough. This is critical to a good design because skimpy perennial beds are really tough to make look good. The old Greeks had it right with their golden mean of design. Figure on one foot of width for every three feet of length. So, a fifteen foot long perennial bed should be at least five feet wide. The maximum width for a bed seems to be in the ten to fifteen foot width; anything wider and you can’t see the flowers at the back of the bed.
Thick Plantings
A great perennial flower design doesn’t have soil showing between the plants. I feel badly about this because most of my garden is pretty young and even with all the new plants I’ve put in the past two years, there’s still way too much bare soil in my garden. The plants haven’t grown up and I need still more plants to fill those spaces and give me the cottage look I love. Leaving bare spaces between plants simply leaves the garden looking young. Or, the gardener looking cheap.
Reflects Gardener's Plant Preferences
A truly wonderful perennial garden design reflects the house and surroundings. There’s little sense trying to build perfectly square formal flower beds around an informal cottage type of house and equally out of place is the meandering cottage garden in a formalized setting. My stone-cottage farmhouse would look pretty silly surrounded by formal gardens so it is with some relief that I can say my gardens reflect their country setting – surprisingly fluid and even haphazard. I do have some squarish beds in the front that seem to be historically appropriate to early gardens but after you leave the front garden, its all curves and spaces. This works for me because each of the beds is large enough and separated from the others to stand on its own. Smaller landscapes, particularly in urban areas, would have to be more uniform in design.
Structure
The better parts of my garden have wonderful structure. Now, on my entranceway garden, this means that I managed to get the huge rocks situated properly to create a little bit of a hill-garden (for my evergreen and bulb collection) and it looks absolutely stunning completely covered with snow. With the evergreens visible year round, the perennials only make their appearance to give me colour for the summer.
I’ve avoided the dreadful line of evergreens along the front of the house; foundation plantings are well-named – they grow up to cover the foundation. By mixing the rocks, perennials and evergreens, I created a garden structure that looks good all year long and lets my perennial garden design strut its stuff for the summer.
Structure is loosely defined as the “big stuff” in the garden.
Think of taking away all the flowers and shrubs; what you have left is the structure of the garden. If it’s simply flat with nothing there to interest visitors at this time of year, well you don’t have much structure in your garden.
Good gardens with good perennial garden design have good structure and I’m pleased to say with the rock, walkways and statuary in the garden, my garden’s structural development is coming along. Still, not good enough for a perennial garden design magazine but good enough for me.
It's Yours
Because that’s really the last point in talking about perennial garden design. A garden is an individual thing and if you like your garden (I like mine) then that’s all the really counts.
We may disagree over what makes a garden great (narrow garden beds however never make a good garden) but we’ll never disagree over the joy we get from going out in them and knowing that, however humble, it is our own garden.
A garden really is a reflection of its owner and if I’m a little messy and unorganized, it probably shows up in my garden. If I like to collect stuff - lots of stuff- then that probably show up in my garden as well.
Hmmm, messy and likes to collect stuff – sounds like my garden all right.
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