Download - Inspired Gardens
Inspired Gardens
Inspired Gardens
By Thomas Sammut
CONTENTSIntroduction
The Cottage Garden
The Modern Garden
The Traditional Garden
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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