The design from the top

I present you with the top view of my garden design. From this view, you can see that my garden is in a rectangular shape. This shape is commonly found in many sub-urban settings in the UK. I've always found this shape to be challenging to design for. Most of the gardens with such a shape in the UK is planted with two long straight borders on both sides of the long-sides, making the garden looks even longer. The alternative isn't better, where people tend to just create a zig-zag path down the garden to create an 'illusion' of a 'wider' garden. How? Go figure.

Back to my design. The rectangle measures 3.5m by 7m. What I did was to build a tall wall bisecting the garden into two halves. The first half (courtyard) should ideally be slightly raised compared with the second larger half (main garden). Both sections are linked by a perfect-circle doorway, inspired by traditional Chinese landscaping technique. In traditional Chinese aesthetics, a circle/sphere (in 3D) is the perfect form/shape. And such a doorway is often called a 'Moon gate'. The moon gate is often used to perfectly frame a scenery, provided by the main garden in this case. I had wanted to created a very simple courtyard garden, with a very simple moon gate, both of which will contrast greatly with the more elaborate main garden. The two main features of the courtyard garden will be the 'miniature moss mount' and the natural stone footpath leading to the moon gate. The main garden will be composed of two ponds, a cascading water feature and a rock garden at the back.

The planting scheme and the whole design can be summarised by the phrase 'an encounter of the trinity of entities with uncertainties'. I will explain more on this on my next posting.