‘When to let well alone’
You never know
exactly what you are going to see
when you visit people’s properties
in the course of your garden design work.
Even with advance descriptions
and photographs there is often a surprise, a pleasure, an unforseen asset.
In the summer we found ourself walking round a largish garden. The positioning and arrangement of the house logically divided the garden up into four zones around it.
So far so conventional!
And then through a 3 metre gap beyond a yew, a holly and a shed we discovered:
A wooded, bowl – shaped enclosure, a long redundant quarry in fact.
And through the silvery grey beech trunks substantial quarry spoil wound itself like the fractured skeleton of a fossilised dinosaur:
So what have we done with this?
Nothing as yet. Our clients have been in and out of the country. Ideas have passed to and fro and we are now at the stage where the final design is agreed and are drawing it up formally.
And our answer to this particular piece of space is still: Nothing!
Well nothing very much. ’ Cos, why would you change what is a paradise actually…….
Sure we’d suggest it was de-littered.
We like the way the limbs of the fallen tree descend the slope. But how stable are they?
A simple, curving stair, cut into the bank, on the lines of earthen treads and pegged wooden risers which would easily weather in to look like it had been there forever, is what one wants!
And while we were at it some suitable lead into this 5th zone should take place above in the garden proper itself.
As to planting, there should be no jarring introductions.
We could recommend adding to the harts tongue fern already there. We might plant some hollies already here in places to give an evergreen, globular dwarf storey. We could plant the odd beech to get a new generation of giants soaring up through to make add to the higher storey. Since juxtaposition of the rocks and trunks is the essence of it.
But again this is almost nothing.
And that is right
As Gertrude Jekyll said in her seminal book ‘Wall and Water Gardens’ it is a case of knowing ‘When to let well alone’!!
R and L
Robert Webber and Lesley Hegarty
The Hegarty Webber Partnership
Category: Design Bites, Garden Planning, The Planty Stuff
http://gdrt.wordpress.com/
Our Suppliers
This is so beautiful – and as you say a classic example of knowing when to let well alone
K
Hi Karen,
Yes it was wonderful.
You just can’t imagine adding extraneous ‘stuff’ to such a space!
Thanks so much for your comment.
Best
R