Garden design (for geeks) (by alaric)
When I was about 11, I designed a garden. I remember drawing a plan of it on a page of my spiralbound notepad. Sadly, that means the original design is now long gone, but that's irrelevant - the original design assumed a plot of land the exact same shape as a page of my notepad, which is unlikely.
The important thing is that I can remember the concept.
The idea was simple - I think of a garden as a fun place to relax. Be that a pleasant spot to read a book, or a venue for a party. Where, to me, "party" involves a buffet and background music and people mingling and chatting.
Therefore, I wanted to pack in a pleasing variety of spots to read/sit/chat into a limited space. Also, being a geek, I wanted it to be intellectually interesting.
So the answer was obvious - it had to involve a maze. But more than that. Two mazes. Why not have a stream and little ponds that forms a water-maze, and then overlay that with a maze you can walk, with little bridges and stepping stones and the like where it crosses the stream, to add interest? And use a variety of materials for the maze; hedges, walls, balustrades, the stream itself - all can form barriers of varying solidity. I love strings of lights in trees and bushes, so let's run lights around it. And have lights in the stream and its ponds. Lights are pretty at night.
One idea that appealed to me was that, for parties and the like, you could have little boats with candles in circulating around the stream. Of course, if it's an actual natural stream, then all the boats would end up stuck at the grating you'd need to put up to stop them all going downstream - but if it's an artificial one (in effect, a long thin pond that wriggles around the place) you could encourage a continuous current around it by putting pumps around the place, sucking in water then emitting it in a jet, with the jets and inlets all aligned around the circuit to push the water in the same way. Extra points for style: Computer control of the pumps so, at the end of the day, you can cause all the boats to congregate in one place for easy collection...
There would need to be a more open patio / lawn area joining the maze to the house, for when you need to gather everyone together to eat and so on. And it would be nice if the other end of the maze led into some more wild and natural terrain such as woodland, after all that order. But the maze would pack a lot of different little nooks into a relatively small space, creating a garden that seems a lot larger than it really is...
I'd draw up a plan, but of course, the actual implementation totally depends on what the land you have is like, and what bits of random architectural salvage turn up to build the maze out of!
Sun 15th May 2011 1:10 pm 
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By Mark, Tue 17th May 2011 @ 2:25 pm
By Mark, Tue 17th May 2011 @ 2:25 pm