Place perfectly hardy plants, foreign as well as native, in woods, meadows, banks and the edges of water where they will thrive and spread without further care, instead of renewing tender bedding every year.
House and garden designed as one
Design the garden with the house and as part of it: carry the lines of the house into the garden in terraces, walls, walks and hedges, divide it into enclosures, and let the architect who designs the house design these as well.
Blomfield’s book of 1892 is a history of the English formal garden written as an argument. The landscape gardeners had swept away the courts and terraces round old houses and left them standing in grass; the Victorian horticulturists had made the garden a collection of plants. He wanted the garden returned to the architect, its walls, walks and hedges continuing the geometry of the house, so that house and garden would be seen and used as one.
Robinson replied in the same year that architects knew nothing of plants. In practice the Arts and Crafts designers took both sides: Lutyens drew the architecture, and Jekyll planted it.
Related rules
Arrange a long border in a sequence of colours: at the ends, cool blues, whites, pale yellows and pinks with grey foliage; towards the middle, stronger yellows and oranges rising to the deepest reds at the centre; then back again. Plant in long, thin, overlapping drifts rather than blocks.
Munstead Wood main border: 200 × 14 ft · cool → warm → hot → warm → cool
Divide the garden into a sequence of enclosures by hedges and walls, each with its own character, colour or season, joined by openings on axes, so that the garden is discovered room by room and never seen at once.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “House and garden designed as one”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/blomfield-garden-with-house. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.