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A Village in a Garden By Avery Harden
Creating the yin-yang with lawns and beds There are basically two elements to our small yard landscapes—the lawn area and the bed area. The problem with most of our landscapes is that the lawn is 90% of our limited dirt area and the plant-beds are a miniscule 10%. Lawns are nice but not that nice—plants are equally nice. One element that makes a landscape
interesting is the yin-yang effect of the contiguous edge between the lawn and plant bed.
To create yin-yang, one must equalize the relationship between lawn and plant-beds. You
can then begin to create some interesting shapes. Get over this dependency thing with your
lawn, plants are also interesting. More plant-bed space allows you to have a larger
collection of interesting plants and inadvertently create a landscape that is more
complementary to your home and the entire neighborhood. I am not suggesting getting rid of your lawn, just use it more strategically. Use it as a yin-yang, intertwining linkage between beds of plants, adjacent homes and adjacent streets. Use yin-yang lawn-bed shapes to de-emphasize property lines and visually unify homes. Why accent property lines? What is the visual appeal of an embellished property-line? Why put a hedge on a front-yard property line? Save the cookie cutting for the backyard where a functional purpose is served. There is no aesthetic benefit to an embellished property-line. Our yards are "small." People move to the countryside so they can have big yards. However, our small yards can have a bigger impact than their relative smallness. A stereotype says that the Japanese farmer can feed 20 people from a plot of ground the size of one of our yards. That is the mentality I take with landscaping and trying to maximize the visual impact of a particular plot of dirt. Large lawns are wastes of good dirt space. Vertical things (plants) sticking up out of the ground that can be seen from a distance in conjunction with a lawn make a more significant aesthetic impact than a flat minimalist lawn by itself. If you need a functional walking or play space in your yard, a larger lawn is fine; but where you don’t, jazz up half of it with some interesting plants — preferably something besides the already ubiquitous yews and azaleas. Get away from the mustache look, where the house is the face and the mustache is the row of plants lined up along the foundation. The dirt of your domain goes all the way to the street. Claim it and maximize it. The County owns the right-of-way but if you use common sense regarding visibility and access, the County will acquiesce in your planting and maintaining it. Vertical elements in your dirt space dispersed from the front of the house all the way to the curb of the street make your space seem larger. Plants turn a two-dimensional lawn space into a jazzed up, more interesting, subtler, three-dimensional space. The architecture of our blocks of homes is more interesting if it appears to be popping out of vegetation instead of merely sporting a mustache and resting upon a minimalist lawn mat. A "village in a garden." Baltimore County has a program where they promote what I just described, but for different reasons. Apart from aesthetics, they are concerned with improving the water quality of the Chesapeake Bay and creating habitat for the urban wildlife. They believe that downsized lawns and increased masses of native plants are good for the environment. Lawns usually require more fertilizers, pesticides and pollution generating lawnmowers than shrubs and perennials. There is more run-off and less absorption of rainwater with lawns. A bed of mulched plants is a better sponge. They believe that native plants grow more easily needing fewer chemicals and less maintenance while providing cover and food for birds, rabbits, squirrels and other urban wildlife. If interested, call the Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management at 410-887-3980 and ask about the Bayscape program. The vegetation and urban forest of Loch Raven Village look best if permitted to ignore property lines. Nature is more appealing on the larger non-corralled scale. When it is chopped up into little pieces as our little yards are, it looks like minced meat. We can minimize the chopped up look in the landscape by applying the design principles stated above. The potential visual contrast between our nice regimented architectural buildings and a free-flowing, undivided mass of vegetation can be very appealing. The fundamental of good design is contrast. Contrast, contrast, contrast — rigid compartmentalized architectural features of permanent buildings verses free-flowing, ephemeral vegetation. A village popping out of a garden. |
