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An Unusual Approach

© Kirk Johnson

At his Design Outside Ltd. website, Garden designer Mark Laurence describes his approach as "perhaps unique, even amongst designers." He may be correct, because he approaches the subject of garden design in a manner that I haven't come across before.

So far, Mark has explained four of his design principles in depth at his website, but I am looking forward to further explanations. The four principles that he has explained are: layers, intangible elements, lines of movement, and having a hierarchy of still points.

It has been difficult for me to digest Mark's point of view, but I will try to apply them to my garden. I have a rather large garden, but one of the interesting aspects of Mark's website is that he shows photographs of small gardens to illustrate what he writing about.

On the subject of layers, Mark states that "The elements we work with are like words. Each element, a brick or a stone, contributes to the generating of a sentence. Each sentence adds to the building of a paragraph, each paragraph builds a page, every page builds a chapter. As we read these pages, through time, meanings emerge which are greater than any individual component or word. These are the intangible qualities and we generate these through many layers to create a sense of place."

I live out in the country. My garden is essentially a clearing in a forest of conifers, so for me it is important to not do anything that goes against my garden's sense of place. I don't really need to create a sense of place, but I can see how this would be important in an urban or suburban garden. Mark seems to be saying that every element in a garden should support the sense of place that you want to create your garden. I try to do this in my garden. There are so many ideas which I have rejected because they were too grand or too suburban for my garden.

On the subject of intangible elements, Mark says that this "is really a holistic concept, whereby "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts". Since my garden is rooted in the formal tradition, which has always focused on line and form rather than individual plants, I have been able to display a collection of plants without having some of the design problems that gardeners who focus on individual plants often have to deal with. Also, the geometric lines of my original garden made it easy for me to expand my garden without losing a sense of unity. This would have been more of a problem if I had tried to add a curving, naturalistic path onto the end of a straight walk. My paths do become progressively naturalistic, but in a large garden this can work because of the amount of time that it takes to travel along a path. In a small garden, the designer has to make clear choices and avoid doing anything which doesn't support the basic theme.