Straw Into Gold : Coaxing a Beautiful, Well- Planned Garden Out of a Ho-Hum Yard

TRADITIONALLY, Americans have gardens and lived in yards. For us, the yard has been the space around our homes, and a garden has been a comparatively small space, within the yard, that we devote to flowers or vegetables. But in recent years, that perspective has been changing. Because the suburbs have burgeoned and property values have soared, most of us have had to settle for smaller spaces around our homes. As our yards have become smaller, we have begun to look at the entire yard as a place for living--for sitting in the sun or shade, for planting vegetables, for growing colorful and graceful trees, for enjoying the company of friends and family.

All over the country, people have started to view their entire yard as a place to cultivate. Suddenly everyone is buying new planting stock. Nurseries are booming. New plant and garden mail-order companies seem to spring up every day. Each time people put new plants into the ground, they extend that part of their property that is personal and expressive and push aside the part that is public and impersonal. They are transforming their yards into gardens.

TOO OFTEN PEOPLE look at their private space, their yard, their house, with a public eye, as though the most important goal of their life was to meet the needs of some impersonal “they.” When such people design a landscape, they call in a designer and demand that the designer do the “right” thing. That way of thinking leads to an awful standardization of neighborhoods. So often the right thing turns out to be the current fad in home or gardening or style magazines, or the look shown on a popular television program, or a landscaping style that makes use of some heavily advertised gimmick or piece of equipment. As a consequence, whole neighborhoods are designed with the same foundation plantings, or the same shade tree in the front yard, or the same rail fence along the roadway. As you drive through such neighborhoods, you rarely see a shady path, a close-growing set of trees or a rock ledge with wildflowers, not because those features aren’t beautiful, but because the homeowners just don’t know that they are possible. Such neighborhoods are not just monotonous, they don’t suit the needs of the people who live in them. They are impersonal.

OF ALL THE constraints of landscaping, those of design will hold you most loosely in their grip. Books about designing often make a great to-do about design constraints and make designing sound like a great mystery that only the very wise and the very creative can understand. We disagree. We would not mention those constraints at all were it not for our sense that hidden behind designers’ fancy terms such as “proportion,” “balance” and “pattern” lie principles that seem to predict how well a landscape will wear with its owners.

Proportion: When you look at any scene, you naturally try to establish a scale. Things are in proportion in a scene when they are all in the same scale or at least when their scales are compatible. For instance, a small fence would look very different wandering through an orchard of dwarf fruit trees than wandering about the tall trunks of an oak forest. Among the smaller trees it might appear comfortably in scale, whereas it might get lost in the forest.

Balance: Your mind also tries to balance any scene that it looks at. Scenes in which the left and the right sides are obviously of different sizes or colors are unsettling to look at. They seem almost as though they are about to tip over. Scenes in which the two sides have elements of comparable size and color feel composed and placid. You might, therefore, consider balance when you set out trees and other structures in your front yard. You might particularly think about balance between evergreens and deciduous trees. A landscape that looks balanced in summer when both kinds of trees are deep green can become unbalanced in winter when the deciduous trees have become all bones and the evergreens are still heavy, dark-green masses.

Pattern: The human mind enjoys looking for a pattern. If a scene is too chaotic, the mind gives up trying to make sense of it and gets confused. On the other hand, if a scene is too simply patterned, the mind grasps it immediately and gets bored. The best scenes combine elements of pattern and elements of novelty so that the observer is always suspended between boredom and bewilderment.

People vary greatly in the degree to which they prefer pattern and novelty. You might like a formal scene in which a few key elements are intentionally repeated. Or you might like an informal scene in which repetition of any sort is difficult to discern. But one thing is clear: Formal and informal scenes--that is, those that are rigorously patterned and those that are not--don’t mix well. A happy-go-lucky, rough-and-tumble garden can work, and a prim-and-tidy garden can work. But a happy-go-lucky, prim-and-tidy garden looks more like a garage sale than a landscape.

Focus: If a composition is not to seem diffuse and uninteresting, it should put one or a few elements on display. Such focus is provided in two complementary ways. One way is to attract the eye. Colorful or intricate objects or those with unusual forms call attention to themselves. In effect, they say, “Look at me !” Another way is to direct the eye. Patterns in the composition, like rhythmically recurring elements or converging lines, can direct the eye to notice particular features of the composition. Such patterns seem to say, “Look at that !” Subtly used, the techniques of attraction and direction can give a composition a sense of focus.

Flow: Compositions, whether they be paintings or landscapes, can differ in their fluidity. A fluid, dynamic composition is one that leads your eyes smoothly from one point of focus to another. A static composition is one through which your eyes don’t move but constantly get stuck in one place or another. Fluid landscapes are more pleasing to look at than static ones. Beyond that admittedly vague definition, it is difficult to explain in words what designers mean by fluid versus static shapes. The best way to understand the idea is intuitively. Think about the shapes of eddies in water, clouds in the sky, or drifts of snow in the winter landscape. Those are all phenomena that naturally flow. If in your choice and arrangement of design elements you imitate the shapes formed by water, or snow or clouds, you will probably be creating a fluid and dynamic landscape. You might find such a landscape more pleasing, more interesting and more comfortable than a more rigid and static landscape.

A WELL-DESIGNED garden is like a good haircut. It not only looks good now: It will look even better in a little while. Too often we are beguiled by photographs of formal European gardens that always look perfectly proportioned, or misled by the plantings of factories or banks whose evergreens seem to stay the same all the time. Those plantings are bad models for the home gardener. Either they are maintained by teams of gardeners who come by and trim the plants each week, or they are, in fact, not plants at all but plastic imitations. Either way, they don’t prepare you for the fact that you must take account of the growth of your plants when you plan a garden.

Plants are like children. When you keep your eyes on them, they appear to be happy and cooperative. But the minute you turn your back, they are at each other’s throats, so to speak. Modern biologists are beginning to appreciate what aggressive creatures plants really are. In their leaves, they manufacture toxins to repel insects. Below the surface of the soil, their roots grapple with neighbors’ roots, each plant hoping to snatch for itself the larger share of the earth’s moisture and nutrients. Overhead, their branches reach out, striving to be the highest to grab the unfiltered rays of the sun.

When you plan your garden, be sure to space your plants widely enough apart so that it will be easy for them to be good neighbors. Advice from your nursery, the description in the plant catalogue and the tag on the plant all will give indications of how large each plant gets and how well it prospers in the shade of other trees.

Nothing is stable in nature. As each plant grows, it gradually changes the conditions around it. Many plants, in time, create conditions hostile to their own growth. In the natural world, they are followed by plants of different types that are especially suited to those conditions. In much of the country, there is a typical succession from grassland to hardwood forest. Old pastures go first to juniper, then to gray birch and pine, and finally to maple and oak.

A similar succession might occur in neighborhoods. When a housing development is first built, its landscape is like grassland, with only a few fledgling trees growing here and there, with grasses scratching out a difficult existence on the barren surface left by the bulldozers. Typical creatures of recent developments are field mice, meadowlarks, robins and song sparrows.

As the neighborhood matures, the trees grow and shed large numbers of leaves. The grass establishes a mat of old stems and a tangle of interconnected roots. A rich layer of humus begins to form on the soil surface. Eventually, the crowns of the trees meet, and the lawn below is taken over by shade-tolerant ground covers and shrubs. In that time, the suburban landscape begins to support a different animal population.

Unless your lot is so small that you don’t control most of the trees that affect it, you can fight the process of succession. Or you can accept it. To decide what to do, study some of the older neighborhoods in your town or city to see if you like the look and feel of them. If you decide to accept the succession, you should adapt your flower beds, shrubbery and ground covers as the trees grow and make the ground more shady and the soil more cluttered with roots. If you decide to fight the succession, you will have to plan to thin the trees so that full sunlight can still reach the surface of the ground.

From “The New American Landscape Gardener.” Copyright 1987 by Phebe Leighton and Calvin Simonds. Permission to reprint granted by Rodale Press Inc.