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.
The garden in rooms
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.
At Hidcote, Lawrence Johnston made more than twenty compartments over forty years on a windy Cotswold hilltop, enclosed by hedges of yew, beech, hornbeam, box and holly, some mixed in a single hedge. Each room has its own character: the White Garden, the Red Borders, the Fuchsia Garden, the Stilt Garden of hornbeams pleached on bare trunks, and the Long Walk of grass between hornbeam hedges. Axes cross from room to room through openings, so that each room frames a view into the next.
The plan is old: the Italian secret garden and the walled gardens of the Tudors are rooms. What is new is the planting, a gardener’s collection arranged by colour inside an architect’s plan. At Sissinghurst Harold Nicolson laid out the axes and enclosures and Vita Sackville-West filled them, in the White Garden, the Rose Garden, the Cottage Garden of reds and yellows, and the herb garden.
Related rules
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.
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
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The garden in rooms”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/garden-rooms. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.