Room for Creativity

By Susan Smith-Durisek
Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader

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Great landscaping expectations have taken a 180-degree turn.

The traditional perspective of a home with curb appeal -- meaning surrounded by spacious, sweeping lawns and framed by evergreens with a smattering of color in perennial borders -- has evolved to encompass vistas from the inside outward.

Garden rooms, created as intimate enclosures around the home, provide places for family and friends to gather comfortably outside.

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What are the essentials in planning a garden room? To get you started thinking about the possibilities, a couple of landscape architects have some ideas.

When creating a landscape plan, Bill Henkel finds inspiration in the place itself.

"Each space has some kind of spirit," he says, "and it's the technician's job to put people's needs together with possibilities in developing a plan."

In the city, privacy and street noise are major planning factors. His garden rooms include walls ranging from a formal, brick enclosure covered with espaliered pear trees to a more casual custom-designed iron fence with an open, airy effect.

At a house overlooking one of Lexington's reservoirs, he designed a garden room with no walls to maximize the view. A large circular terrace of sandstone was installed to create an island in the lawn to delineate the room's borders. Water features bring the garden to life and create motion with brightly colored fish, a welcoming habitat for birds, and splashing fountains, which mask street noise. The fountains and ponds are natural stone sculptures, providing another visual focus in the gardens. Pathways, patios and walls are lined with Arts and Crafts-style lighting that enhance and illuminate the areas for evening use.

Thinking in layers from the home outward, you could move through a series of well-defined rooms, from an enclosed porch, through a shaded patio, across a sunny lawn, into a perennial border with easy-care roses and evergreen shrubbery supplemented by annuals, to a garden wall. Adding favorite statuary, a grilling terrace, an enclosed meditation area or a swimming pool are just a few ways to personalize the landscape.

Another landscape architect, Richard Weber, has helped Geneva and Elvis Donaldson shape a series of garden rooms surrounding their historic home, which was built in 1841.

Geneva Donaldson finds the garden's entrance through the gate on the streert to be just as inviting as the indoor entrance hall. In addition to the classic shaped boxwoods, year-round interest is created by fragrant blooming daphne in the spring, a split-leaf Japanese maple that turns bright red in the fall (she calls it a "living sculpture"), and cheery holly berries in the winter, "if the birds don't eat them first." Most important, though, are the Annabelle hydrangeas that are in full bloom for the July 3 party on the lawn, when bands play across the street at Transylvania University as part of the city's Independence Day celebration.

Donaldson, an avid gardener, says that she and her husband spend a lot of time on their back porch, watching the sun set in the evening, so their main garden room is on the west side of the house, shaded by large honey locust trees. Beside the porch, she has planted herbs along a walkway with easy access to the kitchen; her most recently added garden room, in a secret, sunny spot behind the garage, includes vegetables including red- and gold-stemmed Swiss chard, which not only can be eaten but looks beautiful arranged in a crystal vase.

From the porch, there also are shady views, under some Forest Pansy redbud trees that Donaldson says remind her of being under an umbrella, and a sunny pond surrounded by coleus and hemlock. Personal touches, including a wrought-iron planter made by her brother-in-law and the transitional gravel walkway on the north side of the house that once was son Adam's place to play and now is planted with "walkable" thymes, make these rooms uniquely theirs, and a comfortable place for cat Sox and dog Babu to scout about.

As leaves fall and gardens begin to show their underlying structure, fall and winter are great seasons to research and plan, so you can create great garden rooms next summer.