How To Get Edges Right In Your Garden

Garden boundaries always stand out—the trick is weaving them gracefully into the style of your garden.

DESIGN RIGHT | Of all the important elements of garden design, edges receive the least amount of attention in print. “Since edges are drawn wherever contrasting materials meet, almost anything you do in the garden results in an edge,” wrote James Van Sweden in his worthwhile pictorial how-to Architecture in the Garden. “If you build a fence, lay a terrace, dig a pool or erect a retaining wall, you create edges.” Edges make inadvertent, dramatic statements. The eye is automatically drawn to the places in a garden where change occurs, the point of transition from one level to another, for example, or the spot where one material is replaced by something different.

Designers like Anouska Hempel, whose garden for the Hempel Hotel in London is pictured directly above, love high-contrast hard-line edges; others like to fuzz them. The English are famous for romancing straight pathways with flowers for an informal, irregular look. This practice, begun in a big way with the Arts and Crafts gardens of the early 20th century, has been taken to the extreme in Penelope Hobhouse’s former garden in Dorset, England, where the flowers behind her house (pictured directly below) have gone flapping mad, bursting out of their beds and making pathways barely discernible. In contrast, in her front garden, which is mostly green and definitely contemporary, the division between green elements is impressively uninterrupted, with only texture alerting viewers to material changes.

Because Hobhouse and Hempel are conversant in the basic elements of garden style, and they can rummage through their mental catalogue of what edge is associated with which style of garden, they can devise their own original and artistic variations. Anyone can improve their ability to do the same thing by studying the components of historical gardens or dissecting the work of designers they admire.

Get The Edge In The Pacific Northwest

Flat, internally focused and mostly featureless sites like those of Hobhouse and Hempel can allow designers to create their own private worlds where every edge is theirs to choose. Other sites, particularly those along coastal B.C., come with powerful natural edges built in. Streams, rock outcroppings, even views have commanding edges that are better left unchallenged. After all, why would you want to clutter up the foreground and compete with a solid, not-too-distant view? Or install an obviously inorganic element—fussy, formal English beds, for example—next to a natural stream, as often occurs in North and West Vancouver.

With rock outcroppings in a suburban setting, it makes sense to let their edges stand alone in high contrast to another equally powerful element, like a bold sweep of lawn for example, or to blur them in a naturalistic way, as Princess Abkhazi did in her now-famous Victoria garden (CLICK HERE to see what I’m talking about).  Hers are some of the most beautifully integrated outcroppings I’ve seen anywhere.

The thing about garden edges is that while they always stand out, they should never shout “out of character” with a garden’s theme, avoided by first honing your observational skills. —Ron Rule

Ron Rule is a well-known residential garden designer in Vancouver. He is the founder and head of the Certificate In Garden Design program at the University of B.C.

Photos, top to bottom: Hempel Hotel, Ron Rule