Simplicity in Herb Garden Design
So often we seek solace, peace, escape or simple mindlessness in the garden, a place to hum softly as we weed or snip at stray bits of greenery, a spot to sit still for a snatch of time, so precious. We are not the first to do this.
Across time, gentle images and condensed chunks of history illustrate the ties that forever bind gardens with Paradise. Wherever you place yourself in the context of garden symbolism, it is clear that gardens are built to feed the soul or at least to transcend our own time.
And so gardens transport us, as we transform them, out of the ordinary of common plants and vacant spaces. This was firmly in my mind as I worked on a new herb garden design recently. The garden is to be a display garden, an easily maintained flowering and fragrant herb garden, something a bit formal yet suited to its location and context on the grounds of an early Pennsylvania stone farmhouse. This new garden "room" also needed to provide a central focus, a centering device, not just for the series of garden rooms around it, but also for the gardener who tends it and the visitor who roams it. Finally, it had to integrate well with the extensive existing gardens.
As I poured through reference books and catalogs and photos for inspiration I was drawn to the most classic designs, simple Pennsylvania German Four-Squares and the rhythm of repeated raised beds from the Renaissance, the simple cadence of boxwood edging combined with repeated shapes and materials. And in the end I settled on a "country garden" vision, simple but elegant nonetheless.
This particular garden room is roughly forty feet square, and as I envision it, there are four "L" shaped corner beds around a central square separated by pale gravel paths about five feet wide. The main entrance to this particular garden faces directly across the garden to a small shed backed by a tall evergreen windbreak on the far side. To the right, the path leads to a bench backed by tripod frames clothed in annual vines, beyond that the area is bordered by a split rail fence; to the left, it heads out through a new hops-covered arbor and past the shrub border to an open grassy area. As you stand at the entrance your back is to a delightful kitchen garden of raised beds and espaliered fruit trees.
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