Design An Italian Garden From Scratch - Linking The Italian House To The Italian Garden
Italian style gardens often display an elevated formal content in their design style. This style arose from the Arabic garden style, a style which was later adopted and continued by the Romans. The desire to express logic and grandeur in Italian gardens was intensified during the glorious Renaissance period where rationality and logic was taken to an extreme. Gardens including formal parterres, long straight vistas and complex geometric patterns dominated the gardens of this period and this style soon established itself as representing the Italianate garden.
Elements of this formality have continued into modern Italian garden design and the desire to display rationality within the garden prevails. Italian architecture, with its rigid formality, lends itself perfectly to the use of formal areas near the house that pick up and underline the symmetry of most classical Italian houses. An aesthetic link must be made between the house and the garden, in order to create a sense of harmony in the garden space. This can easily be achieved by creating formal areas that compliment the architecture of the house and link the house to the garden.
Formal garden rooms can be created near the house by using a rational geometry i.e. square or rectangular areas that run adjacent to the lines of the house. This can be done by using neatly clipped hedges of bay-laurel, boxwood or yew, or simply by creating supports on which climbing plants can be grown. By doing this we can create small formal areas that resemble and continue the sense of structure that one finds within the house thus extending the feeling of formality into the garden. These garden rooms can be furnished with elegant tables and chairs and used for dining ‘al fresco’ or socialising during the summer months and will provide an extension to the living area.
I have already spoken of the need to create a shaded pergola against the house to provide a direct link to the house and to create the first, most intimate of our garden rooms. Moving further away from the house the garden rooms can become less practical and more aesthetic, in order to provide an expression of admiration for green beauty yet display a human touch. This can again be achieved by using hedges or, simpler still by rigid hard landscaping in the form of paths that create a formal design.
One can choose to create a small formal rose garden, flower garden or, more practical still, a formal herb garden. These can be created in the smallest of spaces and one needn’t feel the need to own a large garden to achieve this, as even the smallest green space merits being addressed with some formality. This will link the house to the first part of the garden and will provide a sense of harmony between the Italian house and Italian garden.
Jonathan Radford is an English landscape designer, dedicated to creating ecological, Italian-style gardens from his base in Siena, Tuscany.
Contact him at info@web-ecologica.com
See more examples at http://www.lifeinitaly.com/garden or http://www.web-ecologica.com
Tags: Italian garden design
Add A Comment