Designing your garden

This is Section 2 of the Gardening Seminar:Start your own garden. Comments or questions are appreciated. You can also write to John Eagles.

250px|thumb|right|caption Create spheres

Elements that you can introduce in your garden:

paths,

ponds,

terraces,

grading - The smaller the area the more pains must be taken with the grading; but in any plat that is one hundred feet or more square, very considerable undulations may be left in the surface with excellent effect. In lawns of this size, or even half this size, it is rarely advisable to have them perfectly flat and level. They should slope gradually away from the house; and when the lawn is seventy-five feet or more in width, it may be slightly crowning with good effect. A lawn should never be hollow,--that is, lower in the center than at the borders,--and broad lawns that are perfectly flat and level often appear to be hollow. A slope of one foot in twenty or thirty is none too much for a pleasant grade in lawns of some extent.

bounding lines - A somewhat irregular line of grade will appear to be most natural, and lend itself best to effective planting. This is specially true in the grade to watercourses, which, as a rule, should be more or less devious or winding; and the adjacent land should, therefore, present various heights and contours.

Fields or borders -

Garden furniture -

-- Manual of gardening

Creating spheres in a garden

This is my personal approach of designing a garden. There are many other ways to do it, but i can tell better about my own ideas.

In my garden i try to create spheres. What is a sphere in a garden? It has to be understood in a spiritual sense. A sphere is an area in which a certain atmosphere is created and then can be felt and experienced by visitors of the garden.

In my garden i try to create a sphere for the entire garden, and i try to create a sphere for parts of the garden, and i try to create a sphere for each different field.

Ideally, when you walk through my garden, you sometimes get the feeling of being in a forest, and then to walk over a heath, and you can sit at a pond, or hear the wheat whisper in the wind.

In order to create a sphere for the entire garden, most important is that the garden has a rather clear border. This border doesn't necessarily have to be a visible fence, but it must be clear where the garden begins. Various methods can be used to accomplish this. In extreme cases it may have to be a fence, a wooden fence or a fence made from a hedge or a row of trees. It can also be a natural water stream. In any case, i generally try to put many flowers at the outside borders of my gardens so people who come near my garden are welcomed with beauty.

Back

• Gardening Seminar:Start your own garden to go to the other sections of this seminar.
• What is a garden to go to the former section of this seminar

Next section

• Some science for the gardener

External links

• Sites about garden design

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