Chapter 1 - In search of style
I know that I cannot make anything new. To make a garden is to organise all the elements present and add fresh ones, but first of all, I must absorb as best I can all that I see, the sky and the skyline, the soil, the colour of the grass and the shape and nature of the trees. Each half-mile of countryside has its own nature and every few yards is a reinterpretation. Each stone says something of the earth's underlying structure; and the plants growing there, whether native or exotic, will indicate the vegetative chemistry of that one place.
Green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart. A good garden cannot be made by somebody who has not developed the capacity to know and to love growing things.
I know that in making gardens those which come the nearest to having a sense of unity and inevitability are those in which I have managed not to allow second thoughts or distracting details to blur the original theme.
Style for the garden designer means to assemble all the physical elements of a garden scene, to blend the into a coherent whole and to imbue this whole with all the intensity or, perhaps I should say 'intelligence' that he can muster, so that the whole may have a quality peculiar to itself. Such style must be contemporary since, if a composition has style, it must reflect its maker's intention and, its maker is necessarily of his own day, even though he may have chosen to give his garden an idiom derived from another place or time.
Such borrowings (in reference to gardens built as a facsimile to older styles) are fashions rather than styles and like all fashions sooner or later become dated and unfashionable.
Attitudes towards religion, philosophy and social problems are valid fodder for garden design.
Moslem civilisations have perpetuated an older tradition and designed gardens as a place of rest, for sitting in sun or shade, for listening to the song of birds and the plashing of water, and for enjoying the scents of jasmine and rose and orange.
In the United States a limited and provincial European culture was already outdated a hundred years ago by the rapid growth of a new people in a new continent. New styles from all over the world chase each other through the American scene, to be tried, accepted, modified and then discarded...Perhaps it will turn out to have been one more example of a grafted exoticism in a civilisation which originally derived from Europe, and which was imposed on this vast continent rather than growing from its soil.
One of the more involved garden styles is that of the English garden at the turn of this century. If you analyse a group of important English gardens constructed at any time between 1900 and 1930 you will see that they are based on designs borrowed from every period of European garden design. Terraces, staircases, fountains and architecture derive largely from the late Italian Renaissance; courtyards, green plots and topiary work, come mainly from late seventeenth-century Dutch models. For parterres and the layout and design of flower beds, garden-makers went to Gothic manuscripts, to du Cerceaux or to Kip's engravings of country seats or to the embroideries of Le Notre. To all these stylistic or fashionable influences rich and enthusiastic gardeners added picturesque themes such as wild-gardens, alpine gardens, heather gardens and bog gardens; they used all the elements to frame the widest range of plant material ever cultivated in any one country at any one time. The spirit of this luxurious horticultural 'never-never land' has continued, and has coloured most British and some continental thinking about garden design until today. Here is a style that, as all high fashion must, has spread and degenerated until its mannerisms now inform popular gardening magazines with their ready-made solutions for the small garden: the formal rose beds centred on a sundial, the bird baths, planted crazy paving, and other relics are echoes of the expensive and, to our eyes, perhaps somewhat blowsy formalities of fifty years ago.
Garden designers, like all artists, need nourishment; they need to exchange ideas, to study plans and photographs of new work and to visit gardens; in short, to acquire an education and a wide documentation. All these, all of the garden designer's vocabulary and art, can be either valuable or useless. It is so easy to be glib, to accumulate material, to pigeonhole it neatly and then to make a selection more or less suitable to the occasion and the site - and then to assemble a garden plan with a bird bath taken from Copenhagen, a flight of steps from Italy, some informal planting form Zurich, and a herbaceous border from Miss Jekyll. Shaken up into a new patter then elements will titillate and satisfy a sentimental and uneducated idea as to what a garden should be. But a ragbag of styles has nothing to do with real style; for this process of designing must be very different. The designer will have to see what he is studying. Is this feature where it is because it is necessary and useful, because it underlines some compelling rhythm or form or shape or pattern? Does it have an idea connected with form or light or shade or colour or texture; or is merely a more or less decorative whimsy, copied from elsewhere and with no real relevance? Technical and semi-technical magazines are full of seductive photographs whose charm must be sternly rejected it one is to analyse the underlying structure and rhythms of the scene. The brain will already register the facts presented to it on two levels. The superficial picture will only make its impact on that part of the brain where passing impressions leave their mark; the results of careful and selective study leave a deeper trace.
To use these new materials carelessly is to risk dating a garden, for without the most brilliant yet restrained handling they will indicate 'fashion' rather than style and so will become fatally unfashionable in twenty years.
In a small garden much depends on the simplicity of the theme.
Scale too is also part of style. You must establish a scale by relating it directly to the purposes to which you plan to put your land.
We must draw a very distinct line between decoration and style. A garden artist will only use decoration to heighten the style, that is, the idea from which his whole construction has sprung.
I have set myself one or two simple rules. First, I try to put myself in my client's place and imagine that I have to spend the rest of my life with the garden which I am going to lay out. Next, I consider the use that will be made of a garden.
Chapter 2 - Notes on composition and design
The art of composing a garden is a question first of selection and then of emphasis. When I make a composition for any site, large or small, I marshal all the attributes of that site and arrange them in my mind in what I think to be their order of significance.
I have to keep three dimensions always in my mind and indeed the gardener's fourth - growth in time.
Levels play a major part in composition and usually require discreet rather than dramatic handling. By doing too much violence to the existing lie of the land one risks destroying a harmony which will be difficult to recapture.
Whether the garden goes up or down, and where there is not too steep a slope, you will arrange for winding paths and broken planting if you want to keep the scale of your garden undetermined.
Straight paths, retaining walls, and steps will define and accentuate your design. Steps which are high and short give a staccato rhythm; when wide and shallow they invite a more leisurely promenade.
Where retaining walls exceed five feet, flights of steps at right angles to your walls are apt to look pretentious unless your garden is in the grand manner and on the largest scale.
Long flights should be interrupted by landings since more than ten steps without break appear arduous, though a long flight is permissible for effect where it is not constantly used.
Quite small changes in level are a great help in arranging the proportions, and a retaining wall, however low, is a simple way of giving a sense of structure and vitality. To help the work of the garden a s flight of steps can be broken by a sloping stone or brick ramp set in the middle, so that a wheelbarrow can be taken easily from one level to the next.
At the drawing board, I work out my composition in terms of levels. I try out the proportions of each level space or compartment in relation to the next, and decide how best to divide them, whether by a wall, by steps, or by hedges or by some other method. I have to foresee, too, what vertical features will most justly emphasise my horizontal theme: there must be enough to give point but not so many as to obscure my main intention.
Where a site suggests to me a long straight axis, I try to keep this axis as narrow as I can, proportionately to the area I have to deal with.
As I search out shapes and themes and block them out on paper I shall perhaps give little conscious thought how I am going to express them in detail.
On a site which has no particular charm or character you can make an artificial nucleus or centre where none exists.
What we call voids are solids of another kind.
As I worked I realised that I was working with space, carving the empty air into volumes caught in the angle of branch crossing branch and held by leafy sprays; and that here in the circumference of a small tree lay the meaning of a whole relationship between art and nature.
A serious composition cannot depend on intuition or an an intellectual concept alone. All the objects you are going to place require careful study. If it is a plant you must know its size, habit, colour, texture and cultural requirements as well as its place of origin, its history and the way it has been used whether commonly or uncommonly...When you come to placing, the process becomes more complicated since now the relationship between each single element comes into play and, in gardens, habitual associations quickly become boring and result in a stale reminiscence.
The smaller and denser object of the two discloses its quality of weight in a more concentrated way than its neighbour.
I know how high and how wide my hedge should grow, but I must remember the extension of its root-run and how far it will throw its shadow.
Designing is a practical business and, whether as a whole or in a detail, each part must work. The width of the path, for instance, is justified only by the use that will be made of it. A bad designer will make a narrow grass verge, forgetful of the heavy cost of endless trimming, which will whittle the grass down by inches each year, until all too soon it will have to be remade.
Shrub beds are likely to be wide for the obvious reason that they will contain large plants. Since they are likely to need cultivation only once or twice a year their size does not matter.
Acute angles too will give trouble because wherever they come they weaken the design - your flower mass inevitably dwindles to just one plant in the angles.
In the garden as elsewhere, good design is simple design, whether in its general disposition or in detail. It is better to make a statement emphatically and once only. For instance, such a statement might be simply 'grass' or 'lawn'.
Nothing is so unsatisfactory as a walk through a garden where the same plants or combination of plants keep recurring in small patches at every turn. This is, of course, a rule of thumb to which there are some brilliant exceptions.
When we come to construction and to garden architecture, design admits of no errors.
In a traditional setting, I would design and construct in that tradition if, by so doing, I could get the effect and the atmosphere I was after. If not, I would build in whatever style and with whatever materials best suited to the work in hand.
Once again we come to the idea of the garden scene as a sketch, an understatement in which the architectural elements support a theme by allusion. The pitch of a rood, the broken bar of shadow under the brick nosing of a step, can be enough in themselves to suggest the mood of a garden composition and its historic or stylistic context.
When I come to design any architectural feature I do not think it is just laziness which makes me ask myself 'How simply can I arrange this change in level, or, will a wall be better than a bank?'
A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations.
Modern materials and modern construction offer new possibilities for garden structures as well as certain dangers...This fluid architecture , for all its lightness, will dominate a garden..and will always contrast rather than harmonise with the gardens vegetation. This new architecture means a new approach to garden design and one in which planting will play a secondary and supporting role.
Burle Marx in Brazil has already beautifully demonstrated the possibilities of vegetable abstractions by a kind of painting made with the heavy texture of tropical succulents.
The sleekness of new materials...make for restlessness since they reflect light rather than absorb it.
Good design is a matter of good articulation. It is all too easy to fritter away the effect of a good basic design by working it out in inconsequent detail.
In architecture you can calculate your effects exactly, in garden design you have to allow for the growth of plants which will veil and always soften your underlying design and structure.
Current practice, garden conventions and garden good taste are insidious bonds which fetter the imagination and lead to plans as insipid as they are correct.
...it would seem as if it were empty spaces, captured and held by the barest and simplest framework, which holds the secret.
Chapter 3 - Sites and themes
Paradoxically, it is usually better to try and reduce the width of a view by planting it out so that from the the house you see it only partially.
A strong horizontal line is essential to establish foreground and background in their correct places and to accent the vertical lines of tree trunks or hedges.
Style and site are interconnected, though at this late date in the evolution of a civilisation, when we are able to accept almost any manner of any period, style in a garden must reflect the style of the house of which it must be considered as the extension.
The problem for a garden-maker is always the same, and I always try to discover in what consists the significance of the site, and then base my garden on that.
For a theme, of some kind, a basic idea is essential. I usually like to collect further data by walking around the neighbourhood to see what species of plants seem to flourish in other gardens.
Looking around anxiously at everything, wondering how this or that detail can serve, leads nowhere.
I used to be taught in art-school, 'Know what it is you want to say then try and express it as simply as you can' - so with a garden: if you want a lawn, go all out for it. Make everything else subsidiary to the 'lawn-ness' of your lawn.
It is easy to make mistakes in these associations which can so easily become merely platitudes - an old idea read somewhere, copied from a photograph or seen in another garden.
Once again, you have to 'see' what you are looking at, and see it as though for the first time, and, at this moment, you must be ready to relinquish your mental associations for they may well cloud the clearness of your decision.
Chapter 4 - Near the house
When I come to consider a garden plan in detail my first concerns will be with the house...I like to work with a detailed plan of the ground floor for doors and windows, and even the proportions of the various rooms have a direct bearing on the design of the garden immediately outside.
Entrances are apt to be on the north side and shady side of a house and I think that white flower-colour best accents the play of light and shade.
I so often find gardens that are out of scale and out of key with the pattern of their owners' lives and to be fully satisfying a garden must be more than an artistic or horticultural tour de force.
Here, to anyone who plans to become a garden designer, I would say, draw ceaselessly. Draw plants, flowers, shells, trees, people - learn to explore the surfaces and volumes of all forms of organic life.
Before I begin to elaborate my compositions I like to establish the circulation - the lines of communication between house and garden and for the garden itself. Paths are all-important.
A path must always lead somewhere. Curved paths are harder to manage. On flat ground it is usually better if you see only one curve at a time. Paths indicate the structure of a garden plan, and the stronger and simpler the lines they follow the better.
Wind is the great enemy; any place where one needs to sit needs to be protected and two walls set at an angle to each other are better than one.
Good brickwork makes fine paving. In the north of France, where the winters are long, grey and wet, the warm colour of brick paving and a green lawn look far more cheerful than grey stone, leafless bushes and make flower beds.
Granite or sandstone setts make a good garden pavement provided that you keep the joints between them rather wide. Set too close together these small cubes are apt to look niggling.
You may furnish a garden terrace in many different ways, but the style you choose must depend on the style of the house.
An odd tree carefully placed on a stretch of paving can be used to soften a too formal arrangement, an apple or pear tree perhaps, or, if you will be patient, a magnolia.
The ordinary mahonia is a good plant too for all kinds of places where a permanent green planting can be used. The secret is to cut it to within six inches of the ground every two or three years so that it never becomes leggy.
I like Ceratostigma plumbaginoides and C. willmottianum for their porcelain blue flowers in September, as well as Caryopteris clandonensis with grey-green foliage and misty blue flowers, and Perovskia atriplicifolia. This is a plant to cut back hard in April. Among all these shrubby plants some of the lilies will be comfortable and I know of no better place for Lilium regale, L. candid, L. marathon and L. chalcedonicum or, in a shadier corner, L. erratum.
I think that planting near the house or round the terrace should be bold, and, for want of a better word, sophisticated.
To see [Cercis silaquastrum] and the white dogwood in flower together in Virginia in April is an unforgettable experience.
Another splendid slow-growing tree is Davidia involucrata vilmoniana.
In any moist warm climate I would want to use Embothrium longifolia near the house...It as almost the same intensity of scarlet as the flame tree Poincian regis which sets the streets of Cairo and New Delhi ablaze each spring.
Chapter 5 - On planting: trees
There is so often in landscape gardening a special difficulty: that gap so hard to bridge, between good design and good planting...A professional garden designer, like any other artist, easily falls into the trap of a mannerism too early crystallised.
Your aim, or one of your aims, is to suggest a 'paradise' in the terms of the elements already existing on the site and which gives it its special character, to intensify and concentrate the genius loci and give free rein to a love of nature by offering each plant the best conditions possible for its development. Here is already on of the traps into which the garden-maker almost inevitably falls: in this situation he will tend to let the needs of an individual plant override other considerations.
Plants grouped according to their cultural needs will always give certain major themes for the composition of a garden or part of a garden, while, conversely, the existing soil conditions should be allowed to a great extent to dictate the species, forms and textures of your plantings.
I never mix deciduous azaleas with rhododendrons. Their colouring...the lettuce green of their young foliage and the transparent papery texture of their flowers go badly with the solidity of rhododendrons and their different range of flower colour.
So they plant fast-growing trees and hedge-plants - poplars, willows and privet - forgetting that most fast growing plants are apt to be short lived and have terribly invasive root-systems.
Nothing destroys the harmony of a garden more than the dark blotch of a copper beech or a Prunus pissardii seen among the green of deciduous trees. I think a copper beech can look well when, as a large specimen, it stands near a building of mellow red brick or where there is a considerable group in a setting of huge cedars, firs or pine trees.
All these trees (Acer campestre, A. saccharinum, A. platanoides and Liquidambar styraciflua) are the more brilliant for a foil of Pinus excelsa whose log silky needles even in young trees have exactly the right shade of blue green for contrast with the autumn-fired maples.
I like to plant them rather lavishly (silver birch) for the hackneyed group of three always looks rather thin, and when I want the accent of a single white trunk, I prefer to use Young's weeping birch which looks the better for being isolated.
...Sorbus aria, with its silvery underleaves, and the common rowan will weld together a more exotic planting of the different Asiatic species of mountain ash.
I think Prunus pissardii should be grouped only with other purple-leaved shrubs and trees.
Plantings of small trees make small garden sties appear large. Large trees are useful for a different purpose. They break the stiffness of a formally designed area, make a foreground and a shade pattern where an open view lies beyond, break a roof line or canopy and make a garden of an enclosed courtyard.
Planes, limes and chestnuts are trees for landscape planting on the largest scale but all three have a secondary use in smaller gardens. You can plant them in formal lines and shapes, or use them singly, training them horizontally...To these I would the small leaved elm Ulmus pumila which seems resistant to elm disease, impervious to extremes of heat and cold and as easily trained and clipped as a hornbeam.
There are many varieties of trees which take quite kindly to training and shaping. The Vicomte de Noailles at his garden in Grasse uses Cercis silaquastrum to arch over a terraced walk, and at Bodnant I remember a pergola of clipped and trained laburnum with wisterias to make a dappled tunnel hung over with gold and mauve tassels.
Only scale differentiates the planting of a landscape from the planting of a garden; scale, and perhaps I should add, an even more urgent need for simplicity.
The analysis of any park planted in the mid-eighteenth century shows how well its designer understood the use of form. A park 'clump' of three of five or a larger but always odd number of trees is never circular. They planted trees in lines or triangles of wedges in order to get the maximum effect from the rounded masses of foliage when the trees would be fully grown.
When I have to do large scale tree planting...I always aim at a certain coherence and unity by using one variety, or at most two, as the backbone of my planting so as to achieve simplicity in tone and in silhouette.
The secret of good roadside planting is never try to be original.
The foliage of horse chestnuts is too large and their rate of growth too rapid for them to make satisfactory clipped and pollarded trees but you can cut them en riviera: that is, cut them vertically about four feet from the trunk , from between 10 to 20 feet above the ground, and then let them grow freely...Lime trees like Tilia euchlora also lend themselves to this kind of handling.
As for the aesthetic aspect I would always say: be bold and be simple Landscapes have their own scale and you cannot violate this effectively.
Meanwhile you must go on looking and give your feelings as well as your mind access to the problem. Remember that one of your aims must be to lift people, if only for a moment, above their daily preoccupations. Even a glimpse of beauty outside will enable them to make a healing contact with their own inner world. Nor must you ascribe such an idea to sentimentality. It is one most valid reason and justification for gardens and for gardeners.
In such a park I might imagine a glade of silver foliage; white and aspen poplars, Sailx caerula silvered by each breath of wind, with below them the graceful mounds of Pyrus salicifolia and then drifts of sea buckthorn, Hippophae rhamnoides, Buddleia alternifolia and Cytisus battandieri. For ground planting I would have a choice of half a hundred grey leaved sub-shrubs - lavenders, caryopteris, santolina, tufts of silver white pampas grass and even the most common blue grasses such as elymus and Festuca blanca.
To plant trees is to give body and life to one's dreams of a better world.
Like clay for the potter, the engraver's burin or a painter's colours, trees will be the raw materials with which you will construct a landscape or a garden. To learn to handle them as such you must learn to know them from as many aspects as you can. Study them as seedlings and as young plants and learn to recognise them at all stages of their growth and at different times of year. Drawing them carefully is a special and rewarding way of learning them. Take a leaf, a twig, a branch or a whole tree. AS your pencil tries, however inexpertly, to render the shape and texture of a leaf or the silhouette of a tree or the point where the trunk divides and branches, you will find that inevitably you absorb an understanding of the forces at work in the tree's growth: you will fee its nature and sense each branch as though it were your own arm. (No matter what the drawing looks like: your aim is not to make a pretty picture but to increase your understanding.) In this way you will fast acquire a kind of tree-love if, as I think, 'love' is that kind of knowledge that is deeper than the superficial information accumulated by the everyday functioning of the brain alone.
Chapter 6 - On planting: shrubs
I like to see these same hydrangeas [Hydrangea macrophylla] massed in moist and shady woods where they look no more exotic than Rhododendron ponticum.
Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora, useful for its late flowering, is a shrub for massing in sun or light shade or to use in small groups to reinforce a herbaceous planting. Hydrangea macrophylla, H. viloosa, H. sargentiana and H. quercifolia are all admirable plants with strongly defined foliage and a distinguished habit of growth. They are as good grouped in a wildish spot as used singly or in small groups at key points in the garden, provided you can give them a deep and moist soil. Here I would mention H. petiolaris...its chief merit is that it will grow in deep shade on a north wall or under trees and, given time, it will make a ground-cover like ivy.
These are plants [Chaenomeles spp] to mass, mixed or by colours, up to fifty or a hundred at a time in a sunny open space where I like to see them as a cheerful and suitable groundwork for groups of the better cotoneasters such as C. frigida and C. cornubia.
Cotoneaster horizontalis is irreplaceable as a handsome ground cover or trained flat against a low wall. The secret of keeping it in flat fans lies in cutting off every twig or branch which shows a tendency to grow vertically.
Today I think too much accent is placed on flower colour in shrub plantings; evergreens are merely dotted about to fill in ungrateful places where something more flowery will not grow...As a cathartic we might consider how to use evergreen shrubs in the garden to make a composition which will stand by itself before any flowering plants are brought in to add colour and diversity. First, in Western Europe, I would place the ordinary yew, Taxus bachata, as an evergreen of many garden uses...Box in its many varieties is the slowest-growing of our evergreens; left wild it makes a warm and satisfying greenery under wintry trees and there is perhaps no need to enlarge on its uses for hedging...Next to box and yew I like best Laurus nobles, the bay laurel, although only in Southern Europe is it hardy enough to use freely to thicken a wood or to clip into fragrant walls of foliage...I think of it always as a symbol of Mediterranean civilisation and I do not like a garden to be without it...A common shrub in all French public gardens, Viburnum rhytidophyllum is a most effective evergreen which will grow to eight feet high in almost any soil...Near the sea I would add Griselinia littoralis to my list of fine foliaged evergreens to use as a foundation plant round which to build all kinds of different planting schemes; and in a really warm climate the pittosporum family offer a whole range of good evergreen plants, many heavy with scented white blossoms in May or June. I deliberately exclude rhododendrons and camellias from my list. The former for two reasons: firstly, because latterly in places where they thrive they seem to have monopolised the British garden; and secondly, because there exists a large and specialised literature on this subject. Camellia-growing too is a special field, though this is the most magnificent of all evergreens for a frost-free climate...Although it is indeed slow growing and very difficult to transplant successfully, the holly is a superb evergreen plant. I like to use two thornless varieties, Ilex aquifolium hodginsoni and I.a. camelliaefolia...Here [in a garden in Sunningdale] they grew in clumps as a sombre green foil to standard Japanese cherries, a singularly handsome association of plants which I have always remembered and often copied...You might continue to catalogue in this way, but always trying to visualise your shrubs as part of a composition, to take their place in a scheme which you will construct and plant.
If you are a garden designer you can scarcely be a purist since a garden is by definition an artifice. To try to imitate nature exactly, just as to fly in her face, leads to absurdity. When you plant trees and shrubs, however informally, your aim is to intensify a natural ambience and to condense and underline a theme derived from nature herself.
I prefer to think of shrub plantings as exercises in the assembling of texture and shape, with leaf colour as a secondary consideration and flower colour as an additional and more ephemeral satisfaction.
By a judicious selection a rhododendron garden can show flower colour from March until July. With enough peat they can be induced to survive in all but the most limy or chalky gardens; they can be transplanted at their owners' whim on almost any day of the year; and rhododendron addicts form a large class in the upper strata of British gardeners.
The more I plant and the more plantings I plan for, the more inclined I grow to restrict the range of material to be used in any one place.
...nothing is more distressing to the eye than the repetition of the same plants in small patches.
How seldom one sees a tapestry hedge, that subtle civilisation of the wild hedgerow...You need no set tules for making such a hedge, save to avoid a stretch of any one plant: the more you mix them the better. In a garden you might make other experiments with copper and green beech perhaps or with holly and chaenomeles which when the holly berries have gone, will star the prickly foliage with white and salmon and scarlet flowers.
On the Riviera I like to use myrtle as a substitute for box which is apt to become diseased. I cut the myrtle hard back only after its gloriously scented flowering, to make an impeccable and compact green hedge.
Privet, too, turns deciduous in a severe winter besides impoverishing the ground for a yard or more on either side.
Chapter 7 - On planting: flowers
Valerian in its three colours is a first-class plant, as suitable in a the wildest. part of the garden as it is nearer the house or combined with far more aristocratic and difficult subjects. It will grow in any place that is neither shady nor wet and properly handled it will flower for months on end.
I am constantly tempted to lost sight of my theme and scale in my delight in secondary details of planting. One name leads by association to another and, unless you take care, a garden in which you intend to plan for colour quickly ceases to be a unity and turns into a miscellaneous assortment of perhaps charming incidents.
I try first to look at my planting as an exercise in monochrome - to see form only and, for the moment, let the colour ride. For any given situation I endeavour to decide where I need dark, where light, were flower and foliage should glitter and where they should be matt and quiet in tone.
The rugosa rose "Blanc Double de Coubert" foes into every garden I make and very frequently into the flower border.
In places where I use very strong hot colours together, reds and oranges and certain violet crimsons, I try to reduce green leafage as much as possible and here a few plants of the red-leafed form of Berberis thunbergii and a bush or two of Prunus pissardii nigra kept severely pruned, can make a dusky foil to the fiery colours of the flowers.
In the flower garden...I try to come to my planting problems as an architect. My first concern is with forms, volumes, textures and with the constructions of my plant material: then as a painter, I must deal with colour for its own sake and for the planes and recessions it will give; finally, as a gardener, I have to decide which plants I can use and in what combinations.
I think the best way to start is to decide on one or two families that you particularly like or that you think will grow well in the place you have allotted for them.
I am always struck by the contrast between the stylised monotony of the formal bedding-out of annuals and 'soft plants' and the dishevelled incoherence of most of the herbaceous plantings that I see.
Though I will occasionally use triangular shapes I try to avoid any angle sharper than 45 degrees, as narrow angles are difficult to plant and always look thin.
========
There are two more chapters I intend to note:
Chapter 8 - Water in the garden
Chapter 9 - Town gardens and others
The book contains further chapters e.g. on gardening in France or Switzerland, but until that day becomes a reality for me they will have to wait.