Patterns
I am reading A Pattern Garden by Valerie Easton and suddenly things make sense to me.
I began learning about plants and gardening in 2005 when we bought a newly built house in a suburb in Connecticut. I knew nothing about horticulture or design, and I have to say the learning experience over these past 15+ years has been incredibly rewarding.
I created some pretty stunning outdoor spaces and made a new woodland forest to boot, but I had no idea what I was doing. It was all trial and error, and mostly error at that.
I had no design in mind when I started. My singular goal was to hide things using plants.
I wanted to hide the foundation of a new house, hide the view of the neighbors, hide the encroaching weedy meadow surrounding us.
I needed to hide the utility meters on the side of the house and the electrical boxes at the foot of our driveway. The A/C units were a challenge unto themselves.
I had to screen us from an elevated road at the back of our property. And I really needed to disguise the fact that we were living on a flat half acre of unshaded open lawn in a homogenous suburb.
Concealment was my muse, plants were my solution. I saw garden design as isolated problem solving. Got an eyesore? There's a plant for that.
Somehow, from that, I created spectacular gardens. Along the way I realized I needed hardscape too, and we added a stone patio, a gravel sitting area, and I even built a low stone wall myself and put in a tiny but effective stone creek bed. It all helped.
We added bluestone paths, and furniture in the sitting areas.
But I was never satisfied with the whole. It was out of control (too much work, too much a jumble of plants), the sitting areas were disconnected (around to the side of the house, not convenient, not shady enough), the garden tchotchkes I added were haphazard (trellises, pyramids, stone things, plant stands . . ), it all felt too random.
Everything I added seemed to require something else to tie it together and I was just adding more, more, more.
It was beautiful but unsatisfying and I didn't know why.
Reading A Pattern Garden explains why I struggled so. Easton bases her garden design on the Christopher Alexander book A Pattern Language -- the 1,000 page academic slab of a book on urban design principles that explained the connected web of how we experience spaces we live in.
Her book is really accessible and has tons of gorgeous high resolution photographs to show what she means. She describes patterns that make an outdoor space feel right, no matter what climate or setting it is in.
It's clear to me now that my Connecticut garden experiment was lacking these patterns, although I stumbled onto some of the ideas by chance as I went along.
My Santa Fe garden is much more satisfying, much more tied together, and I know why now. It is smaller, of course, so not comparable to my old garden in size, but it's the scale of it that works. And that's the first pattern she identifies. Here are all of them:
Scale (ease, comfort)Garden rooms (use and purpose)Pathways (movement)Bridges and gates (reveal, disclose)Shelters and borders (define, enclose)Focal point (where the eye goes)Sheds and workspaces (working in a garden)Patios and terraces (living in a garden)Water (of course)Ornamentation and containers (art)Materials (the background for all of it)
Maybe everybody intuitively knows this stuff, but I didn't. When I arrived here in my New Mexico home, most of the outdoor patterns were already established and it's easier to build new gardens with the needed elements mostly in place.
The patterns of good design are here and even though the climate is a bitter challenge and my plants are still puny, this place feels so right in a way my grander gardens in New England never did.
What fun, though, to go back over old garden photos and see how it all looked back then, even with my new knowledge of what was wrong!
Comments