Add personal touches to your garden
Additions to your garden, from stone walls to statuary, are a reflection of your taste
Once you’ve identified your favourite style, plants and decorative touches, you can create the garden of your dreams.
Julie Andrews once named her favourite things: Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles, warm woollen mittens.
Gardeners have favourite things, too, and it is usually obvious what they are the moment you step into their gardens.
Gnomes are hard to hide. People still love them, despite English novelist Nancy Mitford calling them “non-upper class.”
At one time, silver gazing balls placed on a pedestal were all the rage, and there was a period where it seemed virtually every garden had a pair of metal heron sculptures standing side by side in a pond or by a lawn.
Sundials and short French potager garden wattle fences captured the imagination of many for a time, and I forget how many gardens I’ve been to where a stone or plaque has been neatly inscribed with the words “carpe diem”.
When I started thinking about favourite things in the garden, I quickly came up with a list of items that always get two thumbs up from me.
I love repetition; the repeated use of a variety of plants used in a way to create a rhythm throughout a garden. It could be something like golden Japanese forest grass dotted here and there as a connecting image, or perhaps a gallery of terracotta pots, each filled with the identical shade of red pelargonium. I saw a lot of this rhythmic, repetitive planting in Italy, especially to line steps, balconies or terraces, but it always strikes my eye as a pleasing image.
It is also always a pleasure to see a beautiful pot, left empty and unplanted, placed in the foliage of a border.
I’m not sure why this image is always so engaging; perhaps it is the idea of a void waiting to be filled or maybe it is the same kind of empty positive space that makes raked Japanese Zen gravel gardens, such as Ryoan-ji in Kyoto, Japan, so magical.
It is worth thinking about what you like most about a garden. Once you’ve identified your favourite style and plants and decorative touches, you can get to work creating the garden of your dreams.
Clipped boxwood and yew is always impressive, especially when snipped into geometric forms, such as pyramids, columns, balls and cubes.
The bird-shaped topiaries at Hidcote and Great Dixter in England are fabulous, but I always find creature topiaries less exciting than simple, minimalistic geometric shapes, although I once saw a gigantic, undulating hedge of yew clipped magnificently into a caterpillar form in a garden in Belgium that would disprove everything I just said.
Benches and chairs never fail to grab my attention. An empty chair, casual grouping of chairs or a bench set into a hedge across a lawn always seems to send an invitation to sit and rest.
In the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, the scattering of empty little green metal chairs always made me imagine happy gatherings of friends and families and lively conversations.
Small, round bistro-style tables and chairs are another favourite. I guess these things just remind me of happy times in France and Italy, but small Paris-style café tables and chairs always strike me as the perfect size and shape for a garden chit-chat over coffee or afternoon get-together over a glass or two of Prosecco. I have at least three of these tables in my garden.
Hanging baskets generally don’t do it for me. I have written about them many times and I have planted dozens of them and hung them dutifully like all gardeners have, but I am not a fan and now I have simply given up bothering. I like to see them hanging from lampposts in Victoria or in Vancouver’s Gastown, but they do nothing for me in a garden.
Perhaps it is the work and effort needed to keep them happy; you always have to worry about plants getting enough water or fertilizer. Plants in the ground or big containers are far less bothersome and more rewarding overall.
Patio trees — those short, balloon-shaped flower balls on sticks, invariably tibouchina, lantana, euryops or fuchsia — never register more than a 4 out of 10 with me, regardless of how amazing the flowers are. I have friends who love them and I always make polite noises when pressed to stop and admire but it’s a style of growing I’ve never really warmed to.
Rambling, tumbling gardens full of gorgeous shrub roses can’t help but touch the heart but I find myself a bit cool to rose garlands and pillars. I can’t say I have seen any in local gardens, but they are still hugely popular at famous rose gardens such as the Bagatelle in Paris.
Rough grass with a narrow, winding path mowed through it is an image I find irresistible. Ditto for framed views, or walkways that add structure, focus and elegant definition.
Gardens with little amphitheatres and fire pits or grassy humps always make me envious. And I’m a sucker for stone walls, especially short dry-stacked ones with vertical coping, and crazy-paved slate patios, particularly ones using Pennsylvania blue stone.
Water in most forms always draws a positive response, particularly when used to create soothing sounds. Weirs are my favourite because of the silky sleekness of their shallow curtain-like shape.
Abstract slices or slabs of rusted corten steel placed in a flower bed or border to add a dramatic contrast in texture, shape and colour always strike me as clever, arty and innovative.
Classical statuary can be immensely evocative, especially when it fits the setting perfectly, such as the beautiful image of a young girl under the white branches of a weeping willowleaf pear in Vita Sackville West’s white garden at Sissinghurst in England.
But tired, over-worked images, such as the water carrier or David or St. Francis, are the garden decor equivalent of forgettable fast-food hamburgers.
Quirky garden art, such as a giant mole atop a mound of soil in the middle of a lawn, was an amusing find in a garden courtyard in Paris, and the heroic statuary of a muscular Hercules positioned next to an equally dramatic and muscular 300-year-old yew hedge at Powis Castle in Wales was pure synergistic genius.
But it is strange what pleasure I get from seeing old bicycles recycled into garden art or transformed into mobile gardens. They can be propped up against trees or fences or just left in the corner of a yard with petunias tumbling out of the front basket. The image is always charming.
Favourites include an old black bicycle smothered by apricot nasturtium and bird’s foot ivy I saw in a London garden, and an old rusty silver bike with baskets front and back stuffed with lilac-flowered hebe and silver leaf calocephalus in Tuscany, France. In 2012 at Floriade, the giant horticultural festival in Holland held once every 10 years, I spotted a superb sculpture of cyclists created out of Chinese privet.
Bicycles, for some reason, are a natural fit for gardens. Imagine my delight when I saw motorcycles turned into floral masterpieces in Mandalay, where riders were almost submerged in blooms carrying masses of flowers from market to stores every day.
You might find it revealing to sit down and compile a list of your favourite garden things. It is also a way of discovering what you really don’t care for and maybe things you should eliminate from your own garden.
Knowing what you love and what you don’t love is always knowledge worth having, yes?