Garden Design | bringing nature closer to home
Behind every good garden is a good design.
Behind that design lies an idea, a vision – often sparked by an inspiring story.
Gardens themselves, well the best ones anyhow, need to portray the story which befits the place to which they belong – their setting and the landscape beyond. Gardens are intermediate and ‘in between’ spaces. As such, they need to tie their adjacent buildings neatly down to their surrounding landscapes. So within any garden design it’s important to echo the materials, the shapes and the forms dictated by the surrounding landscape – whether the environment is an urban industrial one, a leafy suburban townscape, a country lane of quaint cottages, or isolated out in the sticks somewhere out in the wilds and the wilderness. The best garden designs will not only pick out threads of the story, and won’t just play out the vision of the designer, but they should allow the garden to sit comfortably and relaxed in its own landscape.
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However, in order to be truly effective any good design must also resonate the best of nature’s beauty too. Nature is of course our most accomplished and most generous artistic friend, providing inspiration and artistry the human designer can only hope to emulate and never really master. All any artist or designer can ever do is just tinker around with what nature has offered, by the way of its diverse and fully loaded colour palette and infinite canvas, bursting with different shapes and textures just waiting to be used.
Gardens are of course a sensory experience, not only a joy to the eye, but to touch, to experience as fragrance and sometimes you can even taste them too. The very best of gardens will also bring in sounds and movement of wildlife from the surrounding landscape, perhaps themselves even tricked into thinking they’re somehow at home in their natural habitat. They are therefore sanctuaries into which we can all immerse ourselves and drink in through all the senses, wash away troubles from our minds, breathe much deeper, relax, and even drift away for a while.
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