symmetry

One of the joys of being away is coming back and seeing how the garden has changed in my absence.

Before I left I frantically transplanted and re-transplanted. I think I’ve got a new structure that will work – for a while anyway. It’s rained over the last week, and the immigrants are established in their new homes. It’s a tough call. The plants and I can never predict whether their lives will be nomadic, settled or even snuffed out completely.



I am finding that one big challenge in garden design is to know when to use symmetry. You need it sometimes, to define a comforting space and to stop it looking a random mess. But when you don’t want it, it takes a deliberate effort to defy the seemingly natural human urge to symmetry.

This reminds of something Edna Walling once did. She was planting a number of trees in a garden. She got a bag of potatoes, stood at one end of the garden, and threw the potatoes across the area to be planted. Wherever a potato landed, that was where she planted a tree.