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Gardens for Sanctuary

© Carol Wallace

.Gardens, when you are not toiling in them but finally sitting back and enjoying the results, are a bit like places out of time. Your worst enemy in the garden is a weed, or perhaps a Japanese beetle or slug. And to counteract them you have all those lovely flower-faces smiling at you, bees singing in your ear, breezes caressing you. The garden is a haven, a safe place away from the frenzy of the workaday world. Gardens can, when needed, be sanctuaries - places to escape to, whether alone or with your favorite people. It only takes a few simple ingredients

The entrance First, you need is an entrance, preferably one with a gate. Not to keep people out, and not to lock yourself in. But you must have some definite point that gives you, and anyone you choose to admit, the feeling that you are making an entrance - and an exit from the turmoil of the world outside the garden. An entrance makes your garden a destination. And if you have both entrance and gate, you have the satisfaction of being able to shut the door behind you and close away the world from which you are retreating.

It doesn't have to be elaborate. Two potted palms in pots can constitute an entrance, or two tall ornamental grasses - or two topiaries, if you are of the neat and trim type. Set at least three feet apart they give you something to pass through.

Or it could be a structure - an arbor or small pergola. Deck it with roses, or silver lace vine (Polygonum aubertii), let clematis twine among them and you have an entrance to satisfy even the wildest romantic. Make it lacy with wrought iron, or rustic with twigs, or get experimental and try pleaching together a couple of trees to form a natural arch. It's your sanctuary, so make it suit your style.

The "Walls" Of course you can't just sit two potted palms in the middle of nowhere and say "Look - that's my entrance!" You need "walls" around the entry. They needn't be brick or stone. They don't even need to be tall. A small hedge of lavender, or a bright line of annuals can mark the boundary between public space and sanctuary as easily as a row of tall hedges. You could change from grass to mulch, and add a couple small shrubs to make the tall arbor more proportional to the lawn. All you really need is a visible line of demarcation that says "the garden starts here." That way when you walk up to the entrance and peer through you can see that things are indeed different on the other side. What we want when we seek sanctuary is something different from whatever we are leaving.

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