When designing the garden as a single space, united by a common style direction, the site must be delimited into separate zones. Green rooms in the garden are one of the most practical and at the same time the most aesthetically pleasing solutions. And hedges can become “walls” for such garden rooms – in landscape design, this method is used quite often, since it allows you to solve several problems at once. Firstly, hedges in the garden will reliably protect every green room of plants in the area from the wind. Secondly, such green fences themselves carry an aesthetic load, especially if they are not made entirely of boring thujas, but from screens entwined with vines in combination with natural materials.
How is the garden divided into parts? This can be functional zoning (front entrance area, vegetable garden, bathhouse with a pond, etc.), you can divide the garden by color (white garden, green, purple, etc.), based on design, style or collection preferences (regular parterre, shady part with a collection of ferns, host path, Japanese garden …) and so on. What could be the “wall” of such a green “room”? These are high hedges in the garden, garden screens, entwined with vines, or pergolas, mixborder, tree and shrub group, fence.
Each green room has its own purpose in landscape design, and repeating plants and planning techniques combine them into a single whole, giving the garden a clear structure and filling it with a sense of harmony and peace. Plants with flowers of the same color or with a similar form of growth can act as repeating elements, for example, “balls” on a trunk and without it, scattered here and there in the garden, as well as the same materials used for paving or, for example, for making supports for vines. The Chinese compared the garden to a piece of music in which the same melody is repeated in several places or there are variations or fragments of it.
Method of green rooms from plants on the site (with a diagram)
Designing a garden using the green room method is a versatile method that can be used to create a comfortable garden for a family with a wide variety of interests and needs. It is quite possible to combine different garden styles and arrange plant collections in it. In this way the famous English garden Apple Court was designed, which consists of four almost square “rooms”.
Look at the diagram of green rooms from plants on the site: one of the zones can be a parterre with a collection of daylilies and a rectangular cereal bed in the middle; the second is a white garden with a round lawn in the middle and a white mixborder surrounding it; the third, adjacent to the house, consists of a winter garden made of shrubs with beautiful bark, the first spring garden that wakes up after winter, a cereal composition that begins to grow rather late, does not interfere with admiring primroses and hides their “tops” after flowering; the fourth room is a nursery hidden from visitors. What are the “green walls” of this garden made of?
The design of a hedge in the garden can be made from a one and a half meter purple copper beech, as well as a cableway, which is a pillar connected by sagging ropes to which vines, roses and clematis are attached.
Apple court – the garden of a married couple, his wife is a world famous collector of daylilies, her husband, a practicing landscape designer, collects collections of cereals and ferns, writes books on garden design. This is not only a place to live, but also a show garden, where you can come to look at the owner’s design techniques and, perhaps, order him to design your garden.
Using the green room method, you can successfully design a narrow long section – we divide its inconvenient area into several almost square parts (at least 3), build between them “walls” of garden screens with vines, clipped or free-growing hedges and get a suite of green rooms … We lay winding paths through the rooms, “breaking” the straight lines of a long narrow section and opening a new perspective with each turn.
Remember the super task (almost according to Stanislavsky): you should want to walk in the garden! Chinese gardeners have likened a walk in the garden to unrolling a scroll of poetry or a beautiful painting, and every gardener should strive to make his garden interesting to see. The garden space does not have to be divided according to functional characteristics, it can be divided according to color or according to the principle of different stylistics (a fragment in the Japanese style, a country-style vegetable garden, a regular garden with a parterre, etc.).
The size of the rooms can be arbitrary – from the smallest to the largest, even better if they are different in size and shape. For example, in the English garden in the Moscow Region Ubora on Nikolina Gora there are two secluded corners. The first of them is very tiny, it’s just a bench that hides between two evergreen rhododendrons, on which you can retire and calmly sit, dream or reflect. The second corner is a little larger – this is the Bird’s gazebo, placed in a remote corner of the garden, its entire roof is “lined” with birdhouses. This wooden gazebo is decorated with shade-tolerant lianas – maiden grapes and petiolate hydrangea. Without knowing where such a small secret garden is located, it is almost impossible to get inside.
In addition to aesthetic, the green room method can also solve purely practical problems – it organizes a space that is difficult to beat in other ways, most often these are the corners and pockets of the site. This is not a place for walks or a noisy meal, here they think, dream, philosophize, maybe even meditate, but it is always also a place to admire plants or some natural phenomenon (sunrise or sunset, for example), enjoy bird chirping or what something like a water fountain or bird drinker.
Despite the scanty area, the secret garden will help you relax, regain lost strength, and enjoy life. It should be carefully decorated, come up with an interesting paving, maybe intricate, with mosaic inserts, it is a good idea to place a collection of miniature plants here, there will be a small decent sculpture in place, but still first come up with an idea for it, it will tell you the design, not forget about lighting, sunlight or artificial.
Dividing a garden into green rooms is a universal way of organizing a garden space, to which it adds volume, makes it fun and intriguing, and unites it with the house. The walls of the rooms do not have to be dense, dense, visually impervious, it can only be a translucent “hint” to the wall, perceived as a visual barrier.
The method of green rooms in the garden of Elena Klonitskaya
Designing by the method of green rooms is well illustrated by Elena Klonitskaya’s garden near Moscow, which consists of six green rooms. Its structure is clearly expressed, this method allows you to achieve other results: to maximally separate the functional zones from each other, provide a route for walking in the garden, and visually enlarge the site.
First room – a front area, an open-air dining room that can be seen from the gate. Its walls are two mixborders and a garden trellis with clematis. A large table with chairs is placed under the apple tree on the lawn, here the family dines on weekends and receives guests.
Second room – a French vegetable garden, consisting of eight beams-beds extending from the central module with a coniferous composition. It is separated from the garden by a small-leaved linden hedge and a ceremonial mixborder, its two other sides are the boundaries of the site, a two-meter solid wooden fence. Although the garden is decorative, it is quite functional and produces a decent harvest of vegetables and strawberries. Ground cover roses are planted in the narrowest places of the trapezoidal beds, a very small concession to beauty at the expense of benefits, all other parts of the beds are for good.
Third room – a heather garden, a secluded place for reflection. In this place, heathers are collected – rhododendrons, evergreen and deciduous, haulteria, heathers. The circular heather garden is surrounded by a gravel path. And there is a beautiful shop here. Sitting on it, you can both meditate and admire the plants – vines on a garden screen of complex shape, hiding this area from the rest of the garden. You can enter here only by a step-by-step path, the thickets are almost closed, but one more step and you are inside a wonderfully arranged space.
Fourth zone – a recreation area near the bathhouse with a small rockery and a wonderful pond with a quiet stream, and you can sit here on a swing sofa.
Fifth room – an English garden, which has a square shape, it is isolated from the rest of the garden by a hedge made of brilliant cotoneaster and mixborders. Paths cross it diagonally, in the center is decorated with a purple-leaved berry apple tree on a trunk, under which decorative strawberries have crawled. Varietal strawberries grow in the beds.
Sixth room – prikop and school. A real research laboratory is located in a small space, the nursery is adjacent to the garage, it is isolated from the garden with the help of two perpendicular hedges – from thuja and barberry.
A variety of structuring elements serve as “walls” in this garden. As you can see in the photo, hedges in landscape design are successfully combined with mixborders, metal trellises, painted white and entwined with vines.
