ideas for landscaping your home, gardens, home improvement tips, water features & garden decoration
Planning Your Garden
If common-sense principles, based upon full knowledge and recognition of the governing factors of the problem, be allowed to control the design, the result will not only make for beauty, but gardening, in the sense of successful flower culture, will be agreeable and plain sailing.
There must be no exaggeration of special features, no discordant note to worry the eye, no forcing of effects. The size of the garden hardly enters into the question. It is just as easy, and just as difficult, to plan a large garden as a small one. The same general principles apply in both cases. It is largely a question of scale.
Gardens which are made haphazard are rarely successful, yet the majority of small gardens have been so made. The inference is obvious. How often do we not see, from the vantage point of some suburban railroad journey, garden after garden in monotonous succession, all planned to a common type. Some may be neat and well kept, others neglected, but the outlines are the same in all, probably conceived and made by the speculative builder's foreman, whose knowledge and skill can hardly be expected to rank high in this department of his work.
When the gardener himself has taken the pains to model his garden to suit his own views of what it should be, the result is more often than not marred by mistakes which arise from hastiness and an inadequate knowledge of, or attention to, essentials. Possibly the commonest error is to ignore aspect, planning for symmetry, which is hardly ever consistent with the best arrangement for flower growing in a plot of limited size. Another mistake is to over-elaborate, thereby destroying simplicity and breadth of effect.
I do not intend to enumerate here all the shortcomings of the modern suburban garden. I hope to make them sufficiently apparent when I enter into a more detailed statement of the principles which I believe should govern the planning of such gardens. Skilful planning, particularly when applied to gardens of limited size, includes economy of space, or, in other words, making the most of the space available. And this is only possible by giving proper consideration to aspect.
The craze for symmetry prevails too strongly in modern garden planning. Grass and gravel are allowed to usurp positions best adapted to flower culture, whilst long stretches of border in perpetual shade hold a few starved plants, whose sorry condition proclaims the futility of expecting nature to heed our notions of equal-sidedness.
