Sunday, July 29

The Well-Designed Garden
Part Four: Creating a comfortable fit

Scale and proportion is vital to a vivacious garden

Imagine pulling your new Adirondack chair into the middle of an empty football field. Take a seat. How do you feel? Overwhelmed? Frightened?

Now, imagine sitting in that same Adirondack chair on the patio behind your house. Have your emotions changed? Do you feel relaxed? Cozy?

You’ve just had your first lesson in scale and proportion.

By creating a large planting bed on the street side of the walkway, this gardener was able to balance her home’s tall façade and overcome the skimpy planting area that the builder originally installed.

The scale of the plants and the man-made objects that we use in our gardens — and the way that they relate to each other and to us — has the ability to change our entire outdoor experience. We naturally feel most comfortable in a landscape where the spaces we create (and the objects in them) are in proportion to our own size.

One of the easiest ways to get scale right is to introduce familiar objects into the garden. Bird baths and garden benches are good examples. These can serve double duty by acting as focal points and also as visual cues to keep the scale of the garden “human.”

Bird baths, benches and other familiar objects lend a human touch and scale to the garden.

In addition to being people-friendly, our plantings also need to be proportional to our homes. A 25-foot tall ornamental tree can look great at the corner of a two-story house, but put that same tree at the corner of a ranch-style home and it becomes overwhelming. Grouping three to five mid-sized shrubs at the corner would be more appropriate.

Play house
The size of the planting beds should also be in scale with the size of a house. The larger and taller the home, the larger and deeper the beds should be in order to “anchor” it to the surrounding landscape. One of the easiest ways to create larger beds at the front entrance is to run them along both sides of the sidewalk. This not only makes for deeper beds but it also gives you room to plant and repeat a few groupings of annuals or perennials to help draw the eye toward the front door.

Even at maturity, the plants in these narrow foundation beds will not be substantial enough to anchor this home to its surroundings.

If your home sits on a slight hill or is elevated to improve drainage, consider creating beds that are separate from the foundation planting. Borders along property lines and public sidewalks make the overall landscaped area appear larger and, therefore, better able to tie the home to its surroundings. Repeat some of the same plant material found in the foundation design to draw the eye from bed to bed and be sure to use low-growers so you don’t block the view to the front door.

In the backyard, remember that the larger the lot the larger the beds need to be. Groupings of seven to nine of a single variety of shrub are more appropriate here than three or five. These larger groups are more easily seen and create a more comforting space. A hodgepodge of plants can be distracting.

Scale and proportion are felt more than seen. If you don’t get them right, you create a landscape that nobody wants to spend time in. If you do get them right, your garden will feel like an extension of your favorite indoor room.

Next week
Part five: Creating a dramatic entrance garden

Marcy Stewart-Pyziak teaches gardening and horticulture classes locally and at the Morton Arboretum and the Chicago Botanic Gardens. With a degree in ornamentals horticulture from the University of Illinois, this former Will County Extension horticulturist also gardens on her own 10 acres near Wilton Center.