The best people and the best gardens are those that reveal themselves incrementally. Our sensibilities are engaged for longer if not everything is revealed all at once. People that tell you all about themselves in the first 10 minutes are bores – and the same goes for gardens.
1. It’s about a garden having a ‘heart’, and by this I mean a dominant space from which one can move outwards or, alternatively, end up in.
Sometimes one can see this space immediately, other times there is a ‘walkway’ visible in the garden which draws one on to the important defining space. Whether the garden looks inwards or outwards, the point I am making is that there should be some mystery and this takes creative risk-taking. Think of this: you open the garden gate from the road and you immediately see the house in front of you with an open lawn between you and the house. The lawn is surrounded by a flower bed running around the perimeter of the garden with small plants in front and tall ones at the back and there is a tree in the corner. This instantly spells boring, run-of-the-mill suburbia.
2. The trick is to interpose something between you and what you are looking at.
So, maybe there is a grove of small trees that one has to walk through to get from the gate to the lawn. Or maybe the path takes a couple of right angles along which some hedges interrupt one’s direct view of the house. Maybe the tree stands at the side of the lawn rather than squashed up against the boundary. If the garden is larger, perhaps it can be divided up into different spaces using level changes, taller planting or hedges, or even walls or water features.
3. On the next level, one can design planting to have taller plants among shorter ones, which would break one’s view without blocking it – like a sheer curtain.
Verbena bonariensis is famous for this and fennel, Queen Anne’s Lace and tall verbascums or hollyhocks will do the same trick. One does not have to keep to small, medium, large in grades from front to back.
I love to plant trees up against the house – really up close and personal – so that one does not see a whole façade, particularly when one is dealing with a large lawn in front of it. They are lovely from inside where one looks through the trunks and leaves; and lovely from the outside where they soften the architecture.
4. The mechanism of drawing a veil across part of the picture can be used in all styles of garden to create a sense of subtlety.
This makes the garden more intriguing and adds immense charm. It just takes a little enterprising thought and daring to be unpredictable.
Franchesca Watson is a Cape Town-based landscape designer; contact her on +27 82 808 1287 for private consultation, or visit franchescawatson.com.
Photography
Elsa Young
