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Northwest Living Valerie Easton

Sense And Sensibility

Understanding patterns, we make gardens that move us

BECAUSE I AM a garden columnist, it is critical that I design and tend my own garden, for what I learn out there in the dirt informs all my writing. I found the courage to create a garden in large part from what I learned years ago in Christopher Alexander's book, "A Pattern Language" (Oxford University Press, 1977), a groundbreaking slab of a book that advocates the idea that people should design for themselves their houses, gardens, streets and communities.

The surprising revelation that Alexander introduced was not only that people should design, but that they could.

For many years I've also been visiting and writing about other people's gardens, and I've learned that the most successful and satisfying gardens are designed by the owners themselves, or with their close participation. This makes sense to me, for I believe that the garden calls up our deepest instincts, and it is from these instincts that good design is born. These archetypal ideas and longings are what "A Pattern Language" is all about.

Despite its length, dense writing and blurry black-and-white photos, Alexander's book has for decades influenced my thinking, and that of many other people, about how we live and move through spaces, how and why we respond to our environment.

I remember as I read the book experiencing a great number of moments when I closed my eyes and sank into remembering the felt experience of different houses and gardens. We know how we feel when entering a space. "A Pattern Language" puts these human instincts into words, breaks them into "patterns" replicable by those of us not trained in the design professions.

Even today, the configurations that appeal to our deepest instincts help me to understand why some gardens succeed while others are only showpieces. Many of the gardens I visit coax you through the front gate, draw you in, surprise, delight and invite you to lounge on an outdoor chaise for a nap or pause beneath a shady arbor. Others, though visually impressive, provoke nothing more than admiration. Perhaps it is the difference between simply looking at a garden and feeling yourself moving through the garden, experiencing it on a level that engages far more than your eyes and your intellect.

Henry Beston said, "A garden is a mirror of the mind," but this is true only in gardens that go beyond design conventions to truly reflect the passions and interests of their inhabitants.

With my own book, "A Pattern Garden," I hope to inspire gardeners to create spaces that are more than simply outdoor living rooms or collections of plants. The archetypal patterns of garden-making, based on proportions and what our own senses tell us, can be used to make satisfying and memorable gardens. I discuss 14 patterns — including bridges and borders, containers and sheds — that give a coherence to garden design; they allow us to communicate our creativity and aesthetics, for they are deeply rooted in the nature of things.

We instinctively look for and treasure certain specific elements, and working with these elements is the basis for all good garden design. Just as we naturally love to curl up in a cushioned window seat or draw a chair to a warm fireside, so do we enjoy passing beneath the dappled shade of a vine-draped pergola. Certain garden elements offer universal appeal: garden gates, white arbors covered in pink roses, mossy stones, private courtyards, curving pathways, a pair of Adirondack chairs, still ponds, covered porches. We seek such elements in every garden we enter, and relax when we find them. Because each such element, or pattern, is archetypal, site is transcended, and any pattern can be easily adapted and made your own whether you live on a steep hillside, beside a bay, on a flat suburban lot or in the woods.

These patterns transcend not only site but style; they can be adapted to English, Asian or Mediterranean-style gardens. A little bridge crossing a dry gully can be a simple slab of stone, or it can be arched and decorated with Japanese scrollwork. It is the crossing over that matters, not the materials — the feeling of leaving behind one part of the garden and arriving somewhere new.

Alexander's landmark book points out that such design elements as open hearths, alcoves, bay windows, verandas and fireside corners are some of the components that make a house comfortable and desirable. To pattern a garden is a little more difficult, for gardens are more dynamic than bricks and mortar. The fact that gardens are inherently a metaphor for change is a large part of their appeal. But such constant flux can be a challenge. Our experience of gardens is dramatically influenced by wind, rain and sun, by deer and slugs, by plants as they spread, mature and die. Think how you feel in a garden on a mild spring afternoon when the bulbs are bursting through the ground and the trees freshly coated in green. Then picture that same garden during a November windstorm when leaves crunch underfoot and swirl overhead, or on a winter morning when the skeletons of perennials sparkle with frost.

Despite the mutability of gardens, the essential patterns, the proportions, the sense of arrival, feelings of shelter and refuge, enclosure and exposure, the canopy and the paths underfoot all remain to form the archetypal garden that stirs our hearts and invites us in.

This book attempts to put into language and capture in photographs the underlying patterns of good garden design, to connect our thoughts with our feelings, thus making it possible to create satisfying and rewarding gardens.

Understanding what it is we love about gardens enables us to build the essence of a garden that we intuitively feel is right for us.

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