|
Have you ever looked out of your window at the height of the gardening season & thought that your garden is just not working. It may be green & verdant, have plenty of colour & meets your basic requirements (shed, play area, barbecue, hedge to blot out the neighbours), but it does not excite the mind or entertain the eye. The problem here is basic & simple – design.
Most gardens seem to evolve from the varied input of several owners. This almost inevitably means that there is never a cohesive design theme to the garden. When additions or alterations are made they are usually done with practical or expedient intent, whatever is easiest & quickest. Even when a garden has been ‘designed’ the overall effect is sometimes not right. The garden sometimes does not seem to ‘fit’. The factor that can lead to this design cul-de-sac is simple & straightforward, inspiration. Inspiration in gardens is limited by the constraints that many gardeners & so called garden designers place on a garden at the start of the process. Many people, when looking for ideas, go straight to garden books & magazines or my old favourite the television makeover programme. Laudable though this may be, it does spread a culture throughout new gardens, of faddishness. There is a long list of ‘fashions’ in gardens that have been promoted in this way & have spawned replicas across the country often in unsuitable conditions or incongruous positions. Examples that spring to mind are decking, block paving, gravel mulch & water features but there are many more. If a design is centred around this sort of feature then a design will never fit truly comfortably into its surroundings. When dealing with a new client I usually ask them to prepare a swatch of images & textures that they like. These might be of fabrics, buildings, paintings, cars, in fact anything that the client finds pleasing to look at. This gives a good designer a whole host of glimpses into style & feel that is invaluable in successfully matching a client with a design that will fulfil their aesthetic requirements as well as their practical needs. Often, though, I will be given a selection of pictures of gardens with the added by-line “We’d like something like this!” Useful, but not something that can inspire a designer to create something truly individual. The ‘design by numbers approach’ is on the way out. Teaching, as I do, the new generation of garden designers that are starting to flow from centres such as Hadlow College in Tonbridge, waving their honours degrees in front of them, I can see the beginning of the end for those courses that purport to teach garden design by rote. There is no formula for good design, only the product of the imagination of a good designer. Inspirational design in any field comes through a process that balances perspective, proportion, colour, practicality, style, texture…etc, etc. This especially applies to garden design, & it is only after these elements have been considered that the horticultural reality is laid over the design framework to make a garden. Inspiration for a garden can come from anywhere. It may be that a curve on a building or a pattern on a carpet may trigger the process, but if you only look at gardens for inspiration then your garden will inevitably be derivative & will lack individuality. All gardens are different. Each one has different genius loci, the spirit of place & this type of factor when set alongside mundanities like circulation, access, soil conditions & aspect can dictate the design process away from the desires of the client. Unless you want to spent a fortune changing given conditions then the pictures of the current popular garden are never going to materialise in your back garden. The favourite example that is currently cited as “…the sort of garden we want…” is that of HRH The Prince of Wales at Highgrove. This is not easy to shoehorn in to a 12m x 10m garden on a newly built estate in the Sussex Weald. A good metaphor for the garden process is to look at the garden like a human, the design is the skeleton, the hard landscape is the flesh whilst the plants are the clothes. All these factors are important but without the framework, none of the rest will function correctly, whilst a good design will always work to some extent with cheaper plants & materials. To continue the metaphor, any top model will look pretty good in clothes from your local market stall, but will probably look all the more stunning in Versace. So, next time you look out of your window & see jumble sale, close your eyes & think Jean-Paul Gaultier. |
