A possible new client asked if we could draw a design for a garden that would conceal an unsightly new septic system. I pondered for several days whether or not I could wrap my head around measuring and drawing plans for a site. We drove to the lot and had a look and could immediately come up with some good visions. But I realized I am a hands on gardener, not so much of a planner…..I start a garden intuitively, and even if I drew a plan, it would probably change in the course of creation. Another realization became clear: I no longer want to start gardens whose progress I won’t be involved in. Last year we helped with one of a friend’s work projects, choosing $1000 worth of wonderful plants, but because it is not one of “our” gardens and is down a private road, we will never see the “after” unless we make a special effort to go there…and an “after” photo would not reflect the way that we would have liked to maintain and prune it.
To the potential client, I wrote:
Speaking of drawings, I took a weekend design workshop once from famous NW garden writers and designers Ann Lovejoy (Bainbridge Island) and Lucy Hardiman (Portland). Lucy had the most detailed perfectly scaled drawings, while Ann had casual freehand drawings that she called “bubble and flow” (bubbles representing areas of the garden, flow representing the paths one naturally takes through the landscape). So while I might like to be like Lucy, my style of drawing runs more to Ann’s. I loved her style so much that my friend Sharon framed one of Ann’s doodles from the workshop for me.
I had to chortle when rereading a wonderful garden memoir this weekend while pondering whether or not I should practice drawing landscape designs. Dominique Browning, editor of House and Garden magazine, writes about trying to hire the local nursery owner to transform her garden:
He says to her, “I have to tell you, I’m not going to draw up plans, or any of that fancy stuff. You look like the kind of person who wants pretty pictures. Drawings”, he said, stretching it out with contempt. “How is this going to look, where that will go. I have to warn you, I’m not going to give you pretty pictures. It never works Women get disappointed. A plant list, fine…an estimate, even–”
“Gee, thanks…”
“But a watercolor? No. No plans. I don’t do plans.”
(from Paths of Desire by Dominique Browning, a book I have now read twice and cannot recommend highly enough)
By the way, she did hire him to do her garden, hands-on, and the results sounded beautiful.
We spend so much time doing gardening that unless there is a rainy day like today I could find no time to make a drawing. In the evening, I sink from exhaustion and prefer the reading of a book or the watching of a movie to garden planning. I’m not sure how many more years I’ll have the physical strength to DO gardens full time, but if I follow the vigorous example of my mother, I’ll still be wheelbarrowing at age 82.
[…] the escallonia hedge and decided that would be an excellent spot for the bench to sit on gravel. I rarely draw out a design so we just plunged it to see where the future garden led us. The sweet dog kept us company most of […]
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[…] the escallonia hedge and decided that would be an excellent spot for the bench to sit on gravel. I rarely draw out a design so we just plunged in to see where the future garden led […]
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[…] It is something I always want to tell a potential client who asks me to drawn a plan. Because I just can’t. (Or, er, won’t. Or am really simply artistically incapable of […]
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[…] It helped a great deal with my garden design confidence, that while Lucy Hardiman makes design drawings that are intricate and scaled to the inch, Ann’s a more of a sketch, an idea, a chicken scratch….like mine. […]
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