the eyes have it
The height of your trees in relation to your eye level can truly change the way you feel in a space, writes MICHAEL McCOY
When a new neighbour emails you telling you that he thinks the boundary between you is in the wrong place, you’re immediately on the defensive. But when you find that the error is metres in your favour, and the neighbour is keen for you to have the land back, you start making plans.
And so we did, when this very scenario played out for us a couple of years ago. We didn’t really want or need more garden space (any more than our neighbour wanted the extra mowing), but we appreciated the opportunity to make the house feel more balanced within its boundaries. To that end, I dreamt up a simple gravelled area planted with two rows of three trees, with a long table sitting between the rows.
My wife wanted me to splurge and buy six whoppers – trees that would make an immediate statement. Not only was I more wary of the cost than she was (I earn less than her!), I was also very aware of the challenges of taking an advanced tree out of a nursery, where it will be acclimatised to optimum growing conditions (good food, free-draining planting mix and constant watering), and planting it into hefty clay soil that might only be occasionally watered.
Nevertheless, I was keen to get that sense of being in, rather than on, this new space, so I bought six upright crab apple trees
(Macromeles tschonoskii syn. Malus t.), each 1.9m tall. They were only long, single shoots with a little side-branching, but they were taller than me. Something transformative happens when the surrounding planting sits over your head – when you’re not the biggest living thing in the landscape.
What I didn’t allow for was that once the trees were planted, I’d lose the height of the pot. Nor did I factor in that their tips would need pruning back, not only to start them at an identical height, but to make sure the apex was forming strong wood.
So, after those two losses, my young trees were reduced to about 1.6m, and well shorter than me. I’ve been in this game long enough to know that they would soon grow, and that we’d make up the loss, but I was very aware that we’d failed to start out with the sense of enclosure that was necessary for the success of the space.
What I didn’t know was how quickly these things would grow. By midsummer they’d put on at least 80cm of growth, over which time they’d shifted from being under my eye height, to being comfortably head height, to being well over my head. Meanwhile I’d gone from being above them, to being in among them, to being emphatically under them.
In no other year, no matter what growth rate they achieve, will they so dramatically change the way I feel in that space.
It was fabulous reinforcement of a truth I’d been exploring for some time: that our head height, and maybe more precisely our eye height, is a critical datum against which all other elements in the landscape are compared, and determines the gut-feel of any space we’re in.
Michael blogs at thegardenist.com.au