CONNECTING GARDENS TO LANDSCAPE

AN EXTRACT FROM 'SOULSCAPE'

by Peter Shaw

Photography by Claire Takacs

How do you build a garden that belongs where it is planted? You take notice. We often rush with our minds already made up. This way of being works when we need to just get things done, but when we slow down, we foster an unrushed, inquisitive awareness.

When we take notice, our mind has time to explore and to fully take in all that there is to be discovered.

In today’s busy world, getting your mind to this point can take discipline and practice and permitting yourself to take your time to work things out is not always our first instinct. Building a garden invites you to slow down. It’s a lifelong practice when you stop and think about it. There is no other way to go about it.

When out for a walk I often find myself naturally slowing down. I sometimes go the long way. I linger.

I find myself taking longer than normal to get to my destination and not knowing where the time went. As a small boy, I was often told to stop dawdling. Hurry up and let’s get going! I have also repeated these words to my children. Dawdling and meandering seem to have lost their place in our lives.

Having time at hand to linger will influence how you process a garden’s structure. Allowing time to meander at your own pace will let you discover more. Slowing down will allow you to take notice of the wider landscape that surrounds you. Our default setting is to look from the inside out but in a landscape setting, we should be looking from the outside in. Go out into your neighbourhood and down its streets. Look and take notice. Write down what you see, draw what you like and of course, take photos. Then come back to your own place to see it from the outside in. You often hear garden designers say they look to the borrowed landscape for inspiration. This is a good practice and essentially the same thing. A broader borrowing should go beyond just what you may see from the perspective within your garden. It’s more about finding the spirit of the place and finding the meaning behind the way things are. I encourage you to take inspiration from what can’t physically be seen, to look behind and beyond the obvious.

Observing nature can influence the way we build landscapes. Accepting the difficulty of creating a garden in a competitive environment, such as on the coast, allows us to lean into what is already happening naturally. This can be as simple as plant selection by observing

what is growing nearby in nature, and using the same plants in the garden; knowing that they will grow well. When we look closely, nature’s influence can go even further than this and encourage the layout and form of our garden designs. Natural shapes seem to blend in, with their curves, mounds, meandering lines and layering. Materials need to belong as well. Weathered timbers, subtle colours, sandstone and limestone, all seem to blend into a coastal landscape setting. Not every site though, will be as responsive to the local landscape with many areas being predominantly suburban in nature. This shouldn’t be ignored. A suburban garden can be softened and designed without the need to recreate a poor version of nature. There is a lot to celebrate in an urban landscape that can be picked up on in a garden.

In a garden setting we love looking at things up close; appreciating a flower blooming or a tuft of new growth, admiring a handmade seat or a stacked stone wall. But in a natural landscape, beauty can be seen at different scales and nature is often viewed from a distance. The way the hills roll down to a valley or the way cliffs abruptly rise from the flat sea. The way trees grow low and clumpy by the shore then rise to be tall and graceful moving further away. On the coastline itself, we can view the way the sea’s edge is formed along and around the land. It’s rarely straight but meanders in and out. In some places, the ocean seems to be the dominating influence and in others, the land tells the sea where it should finish. It’s a balance of land and sea. A melding of earth, rock, sand, tufting grasses, tussled trees and low wind -clipped shrubs. All this creates a coastal landscape that sits in equilibrium. This incredible natural world that manages to offset itself with competing demands yet find its innate harmony.

All too often, gardens are built in isolation. There is little or no reference to the greater environment in which the garden sits. The surrounding landscape is often ignored at best or even opposed.

What can we take and turn to good?

How can we modify our values for the better? Giving back to the natural world through gardening, and not taking from it, is one way we can contribute. We must ask ourselves, what is the landscape requesting from us? What will matter more in time? Our ideas driven by ego, or our ability to honour what is left of the natural world?

When we create landscapes, we must first think beyond ourselves; beyond our home, beyond our neighbourhood, beyond our suburbs, towns and cities.

We must think beyond our homelands and look to a global place. Once we’ve done this we can slowly come back to our own landscape, to our home town, to our neighbourhood, to our place in our street and finally to within ourselves. Looking from the outside in will bring a greater understanding of where our garden sits in the grand scheme of things.

Global ecology begins in our backyard. It begins in our hearts and minds and in our ability to think beyond ourselves.

If we simplify our human needs beyond relationships, beyond nurturing, beyond love and companionship, all we need is shelter, pr otection, easy intimacy with our home, clean air, a garden, a community, good stories and great food. A garden will provide us with the lot. These basic human needs can help simplify a garden design. Do I have shelter and clean air? Can I create an edible garden to nurture, just as the food that I grow will nurture me and the people around me?

Within balance, a garden can be a place that meets many of our needs without letting greed, ego or competition drive our decisions and our budget. A great design will respond to its place and it’s our job to see what the place is calling for. The thing is, there is no end to seeing. There is no end to landscape and there is no end to a garden.

Completion is an illusion; all the ground might be covered and there may be no space left to work with but this is not the end. In fact, this is more like an opening, the beginning of the next part. As a gardener, this is a good stage to arrive at. The hard work is done and now you can enter into some sort of caretaker mode. A new space where you can simply be without feeling the need to do or to make all of the time.

The secret though, is to stay open to new possibilities and to not shut down the creative work. This still needs to take place and it can be the difference between having a nice finished garden and having a space that continually inspires and that keeps evolving.

I imagine an artist standing in front of a seemingly finished canvas, and then she is tempted to add just a little more. So she gets out a fine brush and adds a tiny dark line here and a lighter line there. She stands back and observes, and then keeps adding small fine touches. Hours later she stands back to find that the work has been transformed by the lightest of touch.

A garden is like this. There will be the big anchor things that lock you in from the start and then there will be the light touches that surround you here and there that hold it all together. A garden is never finished. It’s simply moving into the next phase.

Peter Shaw's book 'Soulscape: connecting gardens to landscape" published by Melbourne Books is available from all good bookshops and orl.com.au.