ideas for landscaping your home, gardens, home improvement tips, water features & garden decoration
Planning Your Garden
Glass
AT THE risk of creating consternation in the minds of those enthusiasts who adore their little glass houses, I must say that I cannot reconcile the greenhouse with the garden beautiful. My remark, of course, applies only to the small garden, in which I have never seen such a structure that was not an eyesore. Its white paint alone condemns it; but that we can alter. Not so its rigid, spidery lines and glinting glass panes. Yet I admit its utility, and I can realize the pleasures that come to the man who carefully tends its crowd of occupants. My quarrel is with the thing itself. If I were advising the owner of a small garden plot on the question of installing a greenhouse, I should say "Don't," because I know that it is possible to have a garden gay with interesting flowers from March to November without glass.
On the other hand, if the gardener desired to specialize in chrysanthemums, or some other flower or flowers for which a greenhouse is a necessity, I would concede the point, regarding it as a compromise; but I should not expect him to achieve a very notable result in the garden picture.
I would therefore ask the would-be gardener to consider whether he really wants a green-house, and if he decides in the affirmative, I would tender him such advice as the following:
1. If possible—i. e., if the aspect is suitable— put the greenhouse against one of the house walls, where it will merge into the main structure, and thus lose some of its identity.
2. If that is unrealizable, place it where it will be possible to screen it from view, so that it does not become a conspicuous object in the vista as seen from the house.
3. Select a simple and unpretentious design, preferably a "lean-to" or "three-quarter-span" pattern, and put it against a boundary fence or wall. These patterns are infinitely preferable to the high-pitched, ridge-roofed, doll's- house pavilions designed to evoke the admiration of the uninitiated.
4. Paint the outside woodwork a pleasant shade of green, not grass color nor eau-de-nil, but something in between.
By observing these hints he may succeed in taking the sting out of his glass box. The gardeners who paint their greenhouses white, picked out with lines of peacock blue, hardly realize the crime they commit. They are blinded to the inconsistencies by the glory of the structure itself, and think not of it as an element in the picture. For the same reason they give it a place of honor in the centre of the garden's width, and contrive that all roads shall lead to it.
