This month’s Design Workshop topic was inspired in part by Great Garden Gates, a recent post by GGW Regular Contributor Debra Lee Baldwin. In there, she shared a gallery of photos showcasing over a dozen great-looking gates: some cute, some quirky, some classy, and all inspiring. Gates like these do double duty, adding personality to their gardens and making the experience of entering the gardens into an event.
Come in to my garden while I look for photos:
Some days you just know the garden needs to be photographed but can’t quite find the photo or don’t know quite where to start. The first and most important lesson to taking a good photo is ….. grab the camera and go to it. You can’t take a great picture if you don’t start. Continue Reading →
Pergolas, arbors, bowers – whatever you want to call them, they’re popping up all over my garden. I’ve got four, and plans to build another something or two this spring. I guess I’m a nut for structure, any kind of structure. As a certifiable plant nerd, my garden is a collector’s mishmash, and comes perilously close to being a poster child for the garden design style that Tony Avent calls “drifts of one.”
But with lots of structure, it works. It might seem counterintuitive, but the more structure you have, the freer you are to experiment around it. Structure provides a framework capable of holding everything together, even of supporting planting schemes that otherwise may not work be because they look too busy or there are too few bold elements. Lately I’ve been tearing out cool collectibles here and there and replacing them with boring but oh-so-shapely Alberta spruce and other reliably geometric plants, boxwoods or hollies, for example. Those kinds of building blocks also boost the garden’s winter interest. Continue Reading →
The other day, I was reading an article in an old issue of Gardens Illustrated about garden design elements, and it made me realize that I’ve been misusing the terms arbor and pergola. I’d always thought of an arbor as a relatively simple structure that arched over a path or a bench and a pergola as a more extensive, roofed structure that provided shade for a walkway or sitting area. According to the article (“Elements of Garden Design: Structures” by Cleve West), however, an arbor is primarily a sitting area and serves as a focal point; a pergola covers a path and frames a focal point, and an arch is…well, an arch. So I suppose what I’ve been calling arbors in my garden are technically arches. Apparently, I’m not the only one that’s confused, though; now I notice that plenty of writers use the terms interchangeably. So, maybe it doesn’t really matter what you call your structures, as long as you like how they look.
Many of you have incorporated arches, arbors, pergolas, and similar structures in your own gardens and enjoy using them as supports for a wide variety of climbing plants. Below is an overview of posts we know about on this month’s topic, roughly arranged by subject. If you know of others, or if you write related posts of your own later on, add a comment below and we’ll include them in the main list. Thanks to all who read and participated! And please, let me know if any of these links don’t work, or if I missed any of you. (It’s getting tough keeping up with you all!) Continue Reading →
In compiling this second batch of photos of arbors in my garden, I was struck by the realization that I am addicted to arbors. I don’t know precisely when this addiction began but my hunch is that it started taking shape on my first visit to Rosemary Verey’s Barnsley House, with its long laburnum arbor walkway dotted with large alliums. Or it could have transpired at Sissinghurst’s white garden with its imposing, centerpiece pergola covered with blankets of intoxicating white roses or at any other number of English gardens whose gaudy and extravagant pergolas swathed in luxurious plant material beckoned to all of my most primitive of impulses.
