Creating Garden Rooms
Garden rooms provide great impact in both large and small spaces. You can divide large spaces into smaller rooms with different themes and different seasonal appeal. For example, a vegetable garden, a shade garden and a flower garden could surround a water feature. If your property is small use the room concept to make your garden more private and beautiful.
A garden room has the same structural elements as you would have in any room in your house–walls, a floor and a ceiling. Then add amenities that make a room welcoming, such as seating and other attractive furnishings.
Floors and Paths
Lawn is the carpeting of choice in many American gardens and they can be very effective in garden rooms if it is well maintained. But many other options such as ground covers, flagstone, brick, pea gravel or wood are available. Most garden room floors use a combination of lawn and a hard paving surface. The paving material is used for paths and seating areas, while the lawn is a refreshing base for the plants that grow above it.
When working in a small space, shape your lawn to make the room look deeper. Have a long gradually narrow as it moves back to the property going. This creates an optical illusion of a longer distance.
Ceilings
A ceiling of clear sky is but one option for a garden room. If you need shade, build a small pergola or attach a lattice panel to posts. Carefully prune tree limbs to make a gracious living ceiling for a garden room.
Ann Arbor covered with fast growing vines can provide shade, color and fragrance; several good fragrant vines are available.
To make your room with private as possible, place the arbor near a fence or wall so you can borrow the existing surface as a backdrop. Alternatively, consider partially enclosing your arbor with it and formal heads of shrubs.
Walls
walls can enclose the garden space, provide privacy, screen external views and soften the garden’s edges. Use any number of materials including hedges, layered shrubs and trees, wood fences, stone or brick walls or even the sides of adjacent buildings. A combination of materials is often successful. For example, walls made of hard materials such as brick or stone might be dressed with narrow, upright evergreens and a few flowering shrubs, with small annuals, perennials or vines planted at their feet.
One of the most enchanting things about garden rooms is that you can design them so that the entire garden is not visible at one glance instead a wall lower heads may offer a narrow opening that draws us from one garden room into another. Another way to screen an area; place a group of evergreen shrubs so that path curves around them into a second hidden room. It is delightful indeed defined as secret setting area a treasured statue or a water feature at the end of a path.
Furnishings and Accents
As in all rooms, you need a spot to set and read a book or enjoy a cup of coffee. You may also want to entertain. Benches, chairs and tables placed on top of a stone terrace or wood deck should act as an invitation to pause in the garden and rest. As you locate resting areas in your garden, consider the view from setting level and place accents of interest nearby. Some outdoor rooms have such strong architectural elements that they don’t need much decoration. Most rooms benefit from the addition of judiciously selected pots, vases, statues,fountains or sculpture. As you consider possibilities keep in mind that the object should blend harmoniously in terms of scale and material so that it does not overpower surrounding plants. To provide focus within an otherwise confusing jumble of plants place an interesting stone that marks a path, a birdbath or mosque covered architectural fragment.
