Choosing your style

PLANNING YOUR GARDEN PART 2


If TV’s popular life-style programmes are anything to go by, the style of garden you have is a way of showing off your fashion sense and your income level, not a way of expressing yourself. But the look and feel of your garden is very personal and expresses who you are – much as the choice of colour for a wall in the house does, or the placement of a picture – it’s the way we almost instinctively create our own style because it makes us feel comfortable.

In our consumer minded society, gardening is a way that we can express taste and style while at the same time avoiding conspicuous consumption or ostentation. There’s purity in it. You cannot express yourself by buying a garden. You have to make one. So when you design your garden its good to think about what the overall look will be before embarking on the detail.

Style in the garden isn't just about fashion - the style of your garden will depend on the kind of place you want to conjure up. You might want an unkempt wilderness or a dense jungle. You may want an informal space where you can add and take away plants to see what happens or you may need a degree of structure and need to impose order.

Modern, formal, traditional, informal – all these are styles and they can be juxtaposed in different parts of your garden. Formality – clean, calm, uncluttered, taming nature and training plants into divisions or walls, using topiary, rills or pools, straight walkways, symmetry. Informality – wilderness, lived-in, disordered, chaotic, evolving, meadows, ponds, woodlands, winding paths, layered hedges, dry stone walls…. A juxtaposition of these elements can create tension and contrast – setting up order then letting it go, clipped hedges enclosing a wild profusion of flowers or a formal patio that leads into a wild meadow beyond.

It is wrong to think that there is one style that is right for your garden and another that is wrong. There are really no rules and gardens are eclectic spaces….have the courage to create your own style.