In the city, a well-designed garden adds immeasurably to living space, to the visible natural world outside the window, and to the overall quality of life.
Even the smallest garden can provide an outdoor living area during the warm months. During the colder seasons, carefully selected plantings make the garden a delightful visual extension of the home.
The garden pictured here occupies a tiny city lot just 17 x 55 feet measuring from the foot of these cheerful black-eyed Susans, Rudbeckia fulgida "Goldsturm," to the house in the background. Yet it affords its owner extended living space on a terrace adjacent to the house, an attractive view of garden--not only in summer, but throughout the year--and the suggestion of a private nature preserve.
A first glance of this pleasant and seemingly casual mixture of plants belies the careful apportioning of space and calculated choice of plants that went into this garden's design.
The landscape architectural firm of Oehme, van Sweden & Associates, Inc., of Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, which designed this garden, used layers of plants, a change of levels, and large-scale plants to increase apparent space.
Large ornamentals in small gardens such as this one set the scale of the garden. The effect is paradoxical: oversized elements in restricted areas enlarge rather than minimize. This visual phenomenon is enhanced by a logical one. If the garden cannot be seen in a single glace, it cannot be understood all at once.
A terrace opens off the kitchen, visually extending the inside space in inclement weather. In good weather, it provides de facto living, eating, and partying space. Off the terrace, stairs leading up to the lushness of gardens beyond are an intriguing invitation to explore. The change in levels works a miracle of increased dimension.
What was a simple rectangle of yard is subdivided into layers by large elements: terrace, stairs, a tree, and the grasses. In the lushness of the planting is a sense of mystery. Space seems larger, more complicated, more interesting.
Rich variety in the plant material included here suggests an easy, natural evolution to the garden's present state. Yet each plant has been painstakingly selected for year-round performance, ease of care, and sequential display.
Another designer might have included a traditional flower border with its mixture of colors and shapes or a uniform, evergreen ground cover. Use of either would have detracted both from the impact and apparent size of this garden and its year-round effectiveness. After its period of summer bloom, a traditional flower border as the only focus of the garden is dull and unattractive. Unbroken use of a single ground cover would have quickly revealed the diminutive size of this property.
Instead, the designers have used broad strokes of a number of handsome plants. The combination of uniformity and variety avoids the pitfalls of both spottiness and
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