Re: Habitability



On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 2:37 AM, Rowan Adams <r*@quickbeam.plus.com> wrote:
I also like gardens that get you to move around to see everything. My mother has the idea that the garden should be entirely visible from the sidewalk in front of our house, but I planned it out to feel like you were crossing a dry creek and that meant islands of plants here and there so you had to walk to the house to get a look at everything.

Exactly!
If you can see it all at once, where's the fun in that?
Perhaps though this is a style of gardening that appeals most to those of us who are the curious exploring types. Some people like to see everything all at once - this may be back to Jay Appleton's thing about security.

I like a bit of mystery, which is why I lifted the idea from Japanese stroll gardens which require you to move around to see all of them. It just feels more like the garden is connected to nature, rather than entirely controlled by man.
 
I ended up thinking that the people who liked lollipopped trees, the ones who always wanted to control everything, who basically felt threatened by trees, were people who were more afraid than trusting of the world.

The landscape company the university I work for had this grounds crew that ALWAYS clipped every tree into a box on a stick or a lollipop. It used to drive me crazy because they would do this to the native oaks which grow rather slowly. I took a walk recently and it seems since they stopped using that company, and hired a much better one, that that practice has stopped.

But, I think the folks who like everything clipped and hedged and made into geometric shapes really are the types who like to feel as if they control the garden. Not that there's any fault with that but it's not my style and I'm not going to be very interested in it.


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