If You Want the Impact to Be Big, Think Small

Outbuildings, similarly, can be used as anchors for destinations within the garden. Sheds, garages and gazebos become the reference point for sitting areas and fulfill an aesthetic role as well as a utilitarian one. But careful placement is vital. Site a building not just for the view to the structure, but the views out of it. One trick of the trade is to walk around your garden with a light plastic chair and sit in it at prospective locations to see what vistas exist and can be enhanced.

Hayward makes the point that many sheds in America (I would add houses) have roof pitches that are too low. A low roof makes a prefabricated shed easier to ship, but it also lacks the charm and lightness of a steeply pitched roof.

Fences, he said, "clarify edges" and need not exist only at the property line. "We can garden in front of and behind a fence that we put in our gardens." He uses a good example of this in his book from Wave Hill, a public garden and cultural center in the Bronx overlooking the Hudson River (and one of the sweetest gardens in the land, by the way: http://www.wavehill.org). A flower garden is edged with a fence of logs in a crude Chinese Chippendale style. The fence incorporates a bench capped with an arbor bearing a climbing rose.

Proving that these ideas have been around a long time in landscape design, Hayward points to the urban gardens of Colonial Williamsburg as small-scale places where homes, fences, smokehouses, wells and other outbuildings provide a framework for the landscape.

It should be said that the creation of gardens on any scale works best when there is a pleasing balance between vegetation and structures. The danger is in upsetting that relationship by overdoing the structures, or even in some settings by painting an arbor or gate white instead of letting it recede in a less insistent color.

Many instant gardens today are weighed down by too much tonnage of masonry: How many more serpentine walls of dry-stacked Pennsylvania fieldstone can the world bear? We seem to forget that trees and large shrubs provide their own structure if given some time.

As Hayward puts it so well: "Pleasing contrast is the key to good garden design. Built structures next to the freer forms of nature make each appear more intentional."