How To Create A Small Garden In A Regular Style

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Versailles style garden

Elements of regularity in home gardens

Regular gardens and parks are one of the greatest achievements of mankind in the field of landscape design. Not a single decent castle in Europe is complete without this peculiar visiting card of a self-respecting nobleman.

Having spread all over the world, the art of creating such parks has found application in more modest spaces. Today, adding elements of regularity to a personal plot, for example, decorating the front entrance in this way, is the best way to give a country house solemnity and splendor.

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Historical reference

It is difficult to say what is more in parks and gardens, divided according to the laws of strict symmetry - the desire for orderliness or the desire to demonstrate knowledge in geometry and one's power over Nature. However, the Egyptian pharaohs, who first allowed themselves such a luxury about 4 thousand years ago, were subject to the fascination with regular-shaped gardens with straight alleys and symmetrically arranged trees.

Symmetrical gardens of the ancient Greeks and Romans with a large number of statues and topiary forms (trimmed to fit certain figures of trees and shrubs); square green courtyards in Islamic countries and, of course, European gardens of the Renaissance - all this is a tribute to the regularity of mankind. Today, regular gardens can be roughly divided into French, Dutch and Italian.

It is believed that the earliest of them are Italian. Since the days of Ancient Rome, the Italians' country villas were located on the coastal slopes, ledges down to the sea. Terracing is the main feature of a regular Italian garden. Straight paths, trees cut to match geometric shapes, bright lawns, arches entwined with vines and covered alleys - all this is an Italian garden.

The green apartments of each of the terraces were interconnected by corridors and staircases, and each separate "green room" was inhabited by peculiar plants - fruit or beautifully blooming. The Italian garden did not have strict axial symmetry, the plantings followed the natural course of the terraces, and yet it was certainly a regular style. The Dutch, like the Italians, divided the garden into a series of closed offices.

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Preference was given to aromatic plants, the house, or rather, the palace was hidden behind the trees, and the owners and their guests had the opportunity to hide in gazebos and pavilions. The Dutch gardens were meant for secluded relaxation and reflection.

One of the distinctive features of the Dutch garden is the presence in it of the attributes of rural life - tiny mills, wells, wheelbarrows with plants planted on them. Peter I, the first national gardener, had great respect for Dutch gardeners. The first garden in front of the park facade of the old Catherine Palace was laid by a Dutchman - Van Roosen.

In the conventional sense, French regular parks are, first of all, spaciousness, endless perspectives, a very large territory where trimmed hedges are freely placed, strict geometric lawns, ornamental flower beds, rarely located, but perfect in shape and execution, laconic rectangles of ponds, fountains, pergolas, spheres and pyramids of topiary forms. The French regular style is luxurious and solemn.

The flat relief of France and rather large spaces, which, in particular, were deprived of the inhabitants of the Netherlands, contributed to the flourishing of landscape art. This style reached its heyday in the era of Louis XIV and, according to historians, reflected the idea of centralization of power. However, since the rise and heyday of Versailles, there have been many variations on the theme of regular parks for those who do not have a royal number of hectares. Today, small resemblances of a French garden can decorate any site, even if it is not too large.

Luxury projections

Lawn. Using the elements of regularity in a private property is the best way to bring a touch of solemnity to the exterior of a country house. However, it should be remembered that even the most modest composition in a regular style remains a luxury item, since its elements cannot be cheap by definition.

All elements of a regular garden, including a lawn, look truly rich and even luxurious. The reason is simple: setting up a regular garden does mean a hefty investment. In a parterre lawn, for example, an exceptionally high seeding rate. In addition, for its creation, the slowest-growing, most beautiful and, accordingly, expensive varieties of herbs are used, mixtures of different varieties and types are never used.

In Russia, the most common type of lawn grass is meadow bluegrass. To create a quality lawn, it is sown at a double rate. To express the idea of the simplest regular garden in a modern "home" version, it is enough to make a high-quality, emerald-colored patterned lawn, using, in addition to lawn grass, a certain amount of inert material for backfilling. Stones are most often used as an inert material: granite screening, river pebbles, crushed brick. In compositions in the classical style, materials of two or three shades of the natural range are most often taken.

Flower garden. The founder of the rules for laying out flower beds in a regular garden is the French architect and gardener Andre Le Nôtre.

In his opinion, various stylized natural forms should be included in the composition of parterre flower beds: branches with leaves, finials (images resembling a flower), ornamental dismembered leaves, drawings of developing stems, grain or trefoil. Parterre flower beds are located in open, sunny places, avoiding shadows from anything, since the latter can provoke uneven plant growth and, as a result, vertical asymmetry of the flower garden.

Usually, the parterre flower beds include only annuals - plants of one year of life; bulbs are used in spring parterres. Perennials for the most part are not suitable for the role of the main characters of a regular flower bed, since their flowering period is usually short.

Almost the only exception to this rule are hosts - perennial ornamental deciduous plants, arranged in curtains and having a very graphic form. In the center of the parterre flower garden, as a rule, some single plant is planted (in landscape design they are called solitary plants). It can be a well-known thuja or a standard rose bush.

A fairly common technique is to install exotic tub plants in the center, for example, an agave, orange or laurel tree (although it would also be nice to have a winter garden where these guests from the subtropics will spend the winter). Sometimes a fountain, sculpture or decorative metal products act as a compositional center. The edge of the flower garden must be perfectly straight; the ornament should be a continuation or, on the contrary, a "provocateur" of the entire artistic concept. Everything in regular gardens tends to be orderly.

In classic parterre flower beds, it is considered important that the flowers growing on it are of the same size within one of the components of the pattern. Therefore, in such flower beds, plants are never sown with seeds, but ready-made seedlings are planted. The average planting density is 60-80 plants per square meter. The narrowest part of the picture cannot be less than 30 cm and, accordingly, subject to the proportions, the entire parterre flower garden is a rather large structure. But this is the very case when you cannot save, otherwise the result will be very deplorable, and, as you know, the miser pays twice …

Trees, shrubs and topiary forms

The regular style is characterized by a rather tough shearing of trees to form a crown, hedges and topiary forms, when trees and shrubs are given geometric or fantastic outlines.

The popularity of sheared trees and shrubs is truly enduring; This is especially true for hedges and bosquettes (French bosquet is a dense group of trees or bushes planted for decorative purposes, often cut in the form of even walls (trellises), balls, cubes or pyramids). Parterre hedges are most often created from shrubs. In the West, due to climatic conditions, there is a very large selection of planting material for such garden structures.

The most popular of these is boxwood. It also grows here, but it is almost impossible to make a high-quality hedge out of it, since it hibernates in our latitudes with great difficulty. The same can be said about beech and berry yew, which are very common in European gardens. For Russia, the most suitable are the Thunberg barberry (for creating hedges no more than 60 cm in height), shiny cotoneaster and privet (up to 1 m and above).

Of the conifers, the western thuja is of unsurpassed popularity, suitable for creating high hedges or "walls of green rooms". Shrubs are planted, as a rule, at the age of two years. Planting density is decisive: 40 or more bushes per square meter. Of deciduous trees, the most common lindens, willows or elms will give a fair amount of regularity to the site.

The most important thing when using deciduous trees in this style is to observe strict geometry when planting and very carefully monitor the formation of the crown. The aerobatics of garden art is the formation of topiary forms, which decorate not only exteriors - they are often kept in rooms.

But still their main "place of residence" is in the gardens. In our climatic conditions, various varieties of thuja western, which differ from each other in the shape, color and looseness of the crown, are most often chosen for the role of plants for cutting. Most often, they take 30-40 centimeter thuja for landing. These plants are planted quite wide (at least 2 m from each other), so that the shape of each individual tree is visible in adulthood.

Of course, at first this landing does not make much of an impression. This moment can be slightly corrected with the help of the already mentioned tub plants, among which there are also topiary forms - pyramidal, spherical or more intricate and playful. Placed between the main plantings, tubs with neatly trimmed trees will help to survive the not too decorative "adolescence" of thujas. Another way is to plant spherical thuja at a distance of a meter, and when they grow up, thin them out exactly by half, finding another place for the dug trees in the garden.

Fruit and berry regular garden

It is difficult to imagine a Russian person who would give up berry bushes in favor of "overseas" decorativeness. And you don't need to do that. Ordinary fruit shrubs may not be comparable to berry yews in decorativeness, but when planted symmetrically and neatly trimmed, they will look no worse than their southern brothers.

A well-done haircut will also increase yields. To make the orchard look like a little Versailles, plant, for example, currants at a distance of at least two meters; try to keep the bushes of approximately the same shape; alternate planting of red currants with black, white or other berries, for example, with gooseberries.

The favorites of the garden fashion of recent years - garden shrubs on the trunk - are most appropriate in such a garden. Raspberries may be suitable for the role of a hedge in such a garden, if you do not forget to prune it and limit some aggressiveness of this plant with a plastic tape dug in along the plantings, which limits the growth of roots and does not let the plant outside the territory allocated for it.

Regardless of where you stop when planning a garden reformation, remember that the main thing for a regular style is the subordination of details to a single whole. It is extremely rare, but there are such projects of houses in which it is better to avoid the breakdown of a regular garden in front of the main entrance due to some glaring stylistic discrepancy. In that case, allow yourself to have a small regular garden in the spirit of French Versailles in your backyard….