Design a Flower Garden Exercise
I've thought long and hard about how we might take the thinking behind my garden work and creations and make it applicable to you. I've written reams of words trying to explain it all.
Gardening is the Slowest of the Arts
Gardening is the slowest of the arts. While a song may last a few minutes and a play for hours, a garden performance develops over years. It may take a year or three to write my next book yet my new garden is the result of 30 years of personal experience with plants and gardens.
A book, a play, a song is set down and is meant to be used in a certain manner. A garden changes based on weather and a hundred different variables every day. When it comes to the thinking of how to design a flower garden, you have to understand the ephemeral nature of this exercise. If you garden, you understand the exact same garden layout and plants will never be the same two hours in a row, never mind two days or even two years.
A Garden Reflects
So in that sense, my garden design is a reflection of its time, its place and its designer/gardener. It reflects who I've been, who I am and the man I'd like to become.
I can tell you and show you the front walkway but I can no more tell you why I doubled its width last week than I could tell you how to fly to the moon. I could tell you I want to use a flat paving stone and garden in the surrounding gravel so I needed it wider. Oh yeah, I could mumble about proportion and plant use there but that would all be an after-thought - created after the deed was done. Beforehand, I simply knew it was wrong and I fixed it.
My Problem
My problem comes, not in telling you how I'm creating the garden walkway zone but in explaining how I simply knew the path had to be wider to reflect my artistic vision of how I wanted visitors to enter my home.
How do I explain that vision to you of seeing myself in a garden, how I use that garden, how I want the garden to reflect the "who" that makes my statement.
It's not just decoration to a good design; it is the reflection of the lives I've lived and the life I live in this house.
You Already Know
Every one of you reading this article knows how to build garden soil or how to search on the links on my sites to discover the techniques. Every one of you can read a garden picture book to see the shape and design of a garden you'd like to copy. You can all plant. You can learn to maintain what you plant.
What you may lack is the confidence, the boldness to trust yourself in the design process. To trust your own sense of of what looks good. To simply let your flaws and mistakes live in your front yard. I sometimes forget - after 30 years of gardening in public- the lack of confidence beginning gardeners have. The hesitation to make mistakes.
Longwood Gardens, one of the premier gardens in the US, came about because the owner traveled worldwide and told his gardeners to "build me one like that... and that... and that" It's a huge copy of a variety of other gardens built by somebody who wanted a garden, had the money and had the nerve to say, "I like that - build it for me."
Spring 2009 with the cottage garden.
One Way to Start
You can start that way. Copy a garden you like. Books from the library are free and the Net is full of pictures. Copy it.
Then change it over time.
Over years. Over seasons. Make it yours.
You will won't you?
Oh to be sure, most of you will not do this and will have excellent reasons or rationalizations. "It's too expensive" (pick a cheaper design to start). "It's too much work" (are you gardening or messing about here) "I don't know where to start" (pick up a shovel, start digging)
Pick your own rationalization; I do.
When I say I'm thinking of writing a fiction book or article - someday. What I'm really saying is I don't want to spend two years of my life and maybe risk failure. I'm simply not drawn to it enough for that. When I say I'm not doing something - I mean I don't want to take the time - don't want to learn - don't want to master the skills to succeed.
Those things I truly want to do - I plunge in. Into the deep end and learn the skills to stay afloat as I go.
And my first results are pretty much gawd-awful! LOL
Spring 2010, siding on the bunk-house, beds built, main perennials maturing and parking lot going in.
Your garden design task
Your task in designing this garden of yours is to imagine yourself sitting in the garden. Create that picture firmly and completely in your mind - from flowers to benches to trees/shade to bird songs and the activities of company.
What's above you, what's below you, to the side, to the front? Write these things out and write them again a month later. And again. And again. See it?
Now build that dream.
That is how I design a garden
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We all can learn from you in how you go about designing or learning about garden design. Please take a few minutes and share what you do - feel free to add pictures as well (up to 4) :-)
What Other Visitors Have Said
Click below to see contributions from other visitors to this page...
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Dear Doug,
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