The 14 patterns

The fourteen essential patterns are elements you can fuse into any style of garden to make it more comfortably your own. First consider the attributes and drawbacks of your unique garden site. Once you're firmly grounded in your own garden reality, it's time to consider the specific patterns. Scale is the all-important first pattern that creates ease and comfort. If you get your garden scale right, everything else will fit into place. With the second pattern, that of garden rooms, you begin to shape space, to consider use and purpose. The third pattern, pathways, leads us to consider both the how and why of moving through gardens. Bridges and gates, patterns four and five, also facilitate moving about the garden, each with its own potential to reveal, disclose, and decorate. Patterns six and seven are shelters and borders, which involve drawing lines, shaping space, and casting shade. Pattern eight, focal points, is integral to all good garden design, as important to the eye as to the camera. Patterns nine and ten are sheds and work spaces, and patios and terraces — all of these elements being vital to living and working in a garden. Pattern eleven is all about water, whether in a stream, a waterfall, or a simple birdbath. The art of gardening comes into play with patterns twelve and thirteen, ornamentation and containers. The fourteenth and last pattern, materials, underlies all the rest, for we shape the garden underfoot, overhead, and all around us by our choice of wood, paving, gravel, recycled materials, or brand-new elements. These are the fourteen vital garden patterns, both concepts and tools, that you can use to shape a garden that pleases and endures.

All too often we start designing our gardens by thinking — and then fretting — about where the garbage cans should go, whether the material of the driveway suits the house, and which tree to plant where. We obsess over all the shades of delphinium blue, or which pulmonaria leaves are spotted in the brightest silver. Perhaps it's true that God is in the details. But to end up with a garden that is greater than the sum of its parts, you must be sure to look up from the details during the course of your garden-making. Gardening is about nothing less than the life force and the endless mutability of nature. If you keep this realization firmly in mind as you create and tend your garden, it can't fail to be satisfying on every level from the mundane to the profound.

Copyright ©2007 Timber Press, Inc. Text excerpts from A Pattern Garden copyright © Valerie Easton. Photographs copyright © Jacqueline Koch, except photos on Bridges, Gates, and Shelters pages copyright © Allan Mandell; and photo on Water page copyright © Richard Hartlage. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of the publisher.