Good gardens speak for themselves

Steve Whysall, Postmedia News 



At Claude Monet's famous garden in Giverny this spring, I saw a group of tourists being marched around by a guide holding an umbrella with a flag on the top.

I watched them for a while and noticed how they were not permitted to wander as they pleased, but were told which way to go and when to stop and when to continue and what to look at and for how long.

It was a little alarming to see so many people trapped in this slavish approach to touring a garden, especially one as enchanting as Giverny.

I thought they surely would have much more fun if they were simply allowed to trust their instincts and let the garden take control and lead them wherever in a natural spontaneity.

The point is, a good garden is always capable of speaking for itself.

In fact, this is a good way of assessing a garden and deciding whether it is a work of quality or not: Does it need explanation or does it speak volumes without a word being spoken?

I think great gardens need no explanation. They don't need signs to explain where to come in and how to walk around and what to look at. They always speak for themselves and need no middle person or intercessory media to validate the experience.

One of the prettiest gardens I visited this spring was Chatonnière, a fabulous country estate garden built around a gorgeous fairy tale château in the Loire Valley.

The moment I arrived at the front gate, I could smell the scent of roses. Their fragrance saturated the air.

At the centre of Chatonnière was a huge leaf pattern with smaller boxwood parterres inside filled with colourful vegetables such as purple-leaf lettuce. This area was also known as the Garden of Abundance.

The idea of the giant leaf emblem was that it would be an impressive feature, one of the captivating highlights of the garden.

But it was not obvious at ground level.

In fact, it was impossible to make out exactly what the design was supposed to be by viewing it at ground level.

All became clear, however, when I ascended the nearby hill and looked down on the garden through a spectacular, long rose arbour. From here, I could clearly see the leaf pattern, which looked fantastic.

Did all of this require explanation? Did the garden speak for itself without need of a know-it-all guide bending your ear?

Well, it almost didn't. And had it not been for the change in elevation, you would not have been able to understand the purpose and value of the leaf pattern.

But because of the proximity of the hillside, it did work and it did explain itself and in the end it all worked out splendidly.

Many gardens are like this. They are made to be seen from above or from a high window or tower.

That is definitely the case at such gardens as Villandry, with its massively complex embroidery pattern of neatly clipped boxwood, and Vaux le Vicomte and Versailles with their intricate flower patterns, created to be seen from high terraces and palace windows and balconies.

Sometimes, it is helpful to have someone explain a key design feature in a garden.

For example, at the famous Courances Garden, I found it very interesting to hear that the sound of a waterfall I could see spilling over rocks in a distance was actually not coming from the waterfall itself, but from a little stream, hidden behind a hedge. The design was meant to fool your ear.

It was equally interesting when I visited Villa d'Este in Tivoli that the lower terrace was specifically kept low to allow visitors to be able to see the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, 40 kilometres away in the heart of Rome.

But these are not essential to the function of the garden.

You should also have a clear idea of where to come in and how to move around.

At Tintinhull in Somerset, for example, the garden consists of a series of interconnecting rooms, but there is never any doubt about how you should move from one area to another - always in a clockwise direction - with easy, obvious transitions.

Well-designed gardens also make it completely unnecessary to explain what to look at.

Views are framed or vistas focused by openings in hedges or corridors of hedging or avenues of pleached trees, sometimes called "stilt-hedges."

At Hestercombe Garden, for example, beautiful views of the country are perfectly framed by oval windows in the brick walls. At Hidcote, the "long walk" is a stretch of grass that is bordered on either side by clipped hedging to bring the country gates at the end into focus.

These are deliberately left open, again to focus the eye and tell visitors, look here, see this, without a word being spoken and without the need of a sign or pamphlet to explain.

Trees and hedges are often clipped in gardens to frame the countryside outside, turning the scene into a picture that would not look out of place on a wall of an art gallery.

This was certainly the case at Chatonnière, where the fields of poppies were framed to look like one of Monet's paintings.

At Hampton Court, windows have been sliced into the yew hedges to allow visitors to see views of the palaces. These openings might as well be saying: "Stop! Look - isn't this a great view?"

Of course, they do all of this without saying a word.

Next time you walk around your garden, imagine you were showing people around in a silent movie: Would the garden need subtitles to explain itself or could you safely say, no explanation needed?

This is, to my mind, a good test of whether a garden is working or not. Try it.

