Your personal backyard garden should be one place where imagination can take flight. It takes courage to let your imagination loose in furnishing your house, or buying clothes, but you certainly should feel free of “what people think” when it comes to your garden.
Recently I saw a postage-stamp-size garden that contained three lengths of ceramic flue tile (I wish my camera would have been handy). I couldn’t quite understand why until I listened to the owners.
Here’s what they said: “In a small fenced off area from the bedroom, we wanted a garden which you didn’t feel you could see at one glance. We bought three ceramic clay flue tiles cut in three lengths – 4 feet, 5 feet, and 7 1/2 feet. We clustered these pilings against the fence and planted among them. When we noticed that this spot had a special attraction for birds. We started leaving bread crusts out there.
Now, when we sit and read looking out into the garden area we will turn on a small sprinkler at the base to watch the birds flit from tile to tile. The birds seem to think there’s a pool back there someplace, and sometimes we think there is too!”
Don’t overlook the fun of little gardens with sculpture, bird baths, fountains and driftwood stumps.
Trees – Roofs for Garden Rooms
Take a wide-spreading tree like an Oak throw in a brick or flagstone pathway, place or build a bench around or near the trunk of the tree, bring in a few comfortable chairs and a table, and you have a summer room that can’t be duplicated by any man – made materials. Where summer rains are the expected as normal add a large umbrella to cover and protect the furniture. Or choose furnishings that can take the weather.
Pavings under trees should not shut out air from the soil. Use bricks in sand rather than brick on concrete. If concrete, let it be in large squares with ground-hugging plants or gravel between the squares. Throw in some seasonal color with potted annuals.
Follow Japanese for More Imagination
If you study the small Japanese gardens, you’ll discover that the secret of their charm is that they plant the feeling of nature, rather than attempt to build a carbon copy.
The Japanese do not bring nature into their gardens in miniature. They do not change the scale of the seashore or the high country. They let three rocks, some moss, and perhaps a piece of driftwood suggest the spirit of the place.
Pebbles… placed to indicate the flow of the stream suggest watercourses.
One Japanese garden was inspired by the hibachi (one of those little Japanese outdoor charcoal stoves). It looked so small, rather silly really up near the family barbecue area. So the couple framed a small square in the ground just off the patio and paved it. They then placed two lava rocks and sank a gallon can of mondo grass to frame the hibachi making the BBQ and important focal point.
