Too many words .. too much reading .. too much thinking are you preparing a thesis for a doctoral degree that will sit in solitude on the shelf of a library and yellow with age or are you designing a landscape that you will live in ?

It is a simple task NOT a big one a return to yourself ... just be alive.

Good Day ...

While I'd not express it in the same fashion, I think mohave has hit the essence. It's all very well and good to wax poetic about design theory, the "ideal" and the "perfection of type", but there is (or should be) a strong degree of practicality involved in creating a landscape design. It should be intended as a solution to a set of issues and requirements. Granted, some of these are aesthetic and even maybe idealistic, but whether they should be assigned more weight in the design process than more practical considerations is not a contention I'd support.

I think your "ideal" is best expressed by a thorough understanding of what you want from your landscape and how you intend to use it. Once you've arrived at that, and the technical concerns and the horticultural factor fully considered - the "right plant for the right place" idea - then things should pretty much just fall into place.

It is entirely possible to overthink the process. I think this is often as much a problem for the newbie designer or non-design savvy homeowner as it is to underthink the process.

Sheesh!! I should have just left it to the Mohave Kid - he said pretty much the same thing in far fewer words :-)

Sorry...I do not understand the question. Perhaps staying more in touch with your 'child' side might help.

Well, if the vision is fantastically beautiful, or if it is humble, it requires the same principle, and that is simply: If it doesn't support your vision, don't do it. This also means 'don't BUY it.'

That's what those words "demands absolute sacrifice of all characteristics, beauties as well as faults, which are not the characteristics of the particular ideal which is being sought" mean. This is a valuable attitude for any vision.

I just did that, too. I bought a tree that I love, but it doesn't fit my vision for that spot. Now I want to move it already. In fact, I'll post a new thread on that.

Choose which media you want to use to make your expression.

If you want to use paper write about it. If you want to use your feelings, read about it. If you want it to be a garden, plant it.

It sounds like you are looking more to formulating an "idea" or "ideal" than in expressing it.

I think the point you may be missing chartreuse is that there is a process to garden design. Everyone has their own views on the trajectory of the process or path so it is not a question of poetry OR practicality it is a question of the order. It suits me best to first talk about possibilities in a fairly spontaneous fashion and from there move towards a more definite or practical way of achieving this within a clients budget. It is best not to get fixed on what the use of the garden is or what plants you want or indeed "Monet light" to the exclusion of any other step in the process. I consulted with a contractor a few years back who had been called in to build a pergola/canopy over a patio and the client did not want the view spoiled with supports. The guy took the job on and wanted me to work out how it could be done. It can be done, some may remember a posting from Ian, a while back that showed it done. The item missing from the process was the cost which clouded the view much more than two brick pillars.

I didn't mean to imply that I designed Ian's one, he did that and built it: just in case anyone misunderstood what I wrote earlier.

Thanks, everyone, I appreciate your replies. I guess the general consensus is for fewer words!

(As for whether I want a garden or just to talk, write and read about one, I wonder about that myself sometimes.)

I dont *think* I have been putting the cart before the horse. I *think* I have thought through the practical problems pretty well, and the answers to how the garden can fulfill those functions seem to have fallen into place quite naturally. (Like laag often says they will.) Im pleased with the practical part.

But Im finding it much harder to fulfill what you might call the "emotional" function.

So far I have completed two different basic schematic designs (no plant selection yet), and done some perspective drawings, and while both are okay, neither seems like "it."

I have been working with a sort of idea, as Ive been calling it: Secluded order and delight. (Yes, thats my thing.) And what Ive designed seems to fulfill this, more or less. But both designs lack some emotional or spiritual intensity Im seeking. I have the feelings, and can walk through a sort of "mind garden" in my head. I just dont know how to translate these feelings into a practical garden within the limitations of my site.

Perhaps Inks illustration is apt, and I have a decisive limiting factor I dont recognize. (Perhaps, as some of you seem to think, that factor is me!)

Anyone with any guidance? Still think Im going about it wrong?

You lost me a little on this one. I'm sensing a striving for some kind of perfection for this garden in that nothing is left wanting of its nature, purpose, or end. Pretty difficult to attain a level where further progress isn't possible.

Ultimately, only you know what evokes an emotional or spiritual response in you. And beauty is what the eye does to what it looks upon. Not far from my family plot is an old Victorian monument - a cross with a sorrowing angel draped at the foot and in the summer there's a tendril of ivy that creeps its way around the base. I look at that and think "how lovely". Would I have the same response to it if recreated in my garden? Probably not. So I deal with my own garden which is condemned never to be but always in the act of becoming and sometimes I can even say "how lovely" about a nice combination of height and width and texture and color.

I do have something of the perfectionist in me, as everybody senses, but I dont feel Im demanding perfection in the sense of something that never changes, or is utterly complete and cant be played around with. It seems to me that one understanding of perfection could be the unity often discussed here.

Another example of perfection for me is the experience of the cycle of the seasons. I used to live way out in the country where my daily walk in the woods took me over and up a stream bed. The experience of watching (and hearing and smelling and feeling underfoot) the seasonal changes in the stream over ten years was a taste of perfection, I would say. I miss that walk. (My present woods-walk has no stream, though much else to enjoy.)

I have been thinking (yeah, I know, Im over-thinking) more about what my designs are missing, and am wondering whether I am too focused on the ground plane, and what lies within a few feet of it. For instance, I have tall perimeter hedges planned, and there are tree canopies, but they alone are not giving a secluded enough feeling. (Im working on a 70 x 40 front yard.) In looking over some pictures of garden scenes that seem to have the quality Im seeking, I notice there is a LOT of height, a lot happening above the ground, even overhead. Vines on house walls; deep masses with several robust tall elements emerging; arching, reaching plant forms. Also, many areas where the various elements are "knit" together. These appear to be greatly heightening the feeling of privacy first established by the perimeter walls and hedges. Its mostly not "exclamation point" height or "leading the eye upward" height, but some sort of enfolding effect. Does this make sense?

You say you want to be secluded, and enfolded. Sounds like you're looking for a sense of enclosure, but not necessarily a mono-planting of hedges. Often hard to obtain in a front yard of that size. Enclosure in a garden evokes emotions of security, privacy, intimacy, even the feeling of hiding. Perhaps the decisive limiting factor you're not aware of is that you want to have a lush private garden hideaway in the Front Yard. Often more successful in the backyard, but much more difficult in the front, if only because one knows that people are on the sidewalk just outside the hedge.

Also, those lush gardens with overarching trees, full shrubs, and tall hedges take years to mature. Watching plants grow over time is rewarding, but there is often a sense of things being "unfinished" until it fills out.

Perhaps you would like to go into specifics of what you are trying to accomplish rather than generalities of design theory.

I don't have a problem with the words personally although it may be a worthwhile exercise to try to boil your idea down to three,just for the heck of it. "Secluded order and delight" is only two words but that kind of thing as nebulous as those words are. This may well be the impetus to shift you on to the next stage of the process because at a certain point these words have to become pictures or concepts and then you will be ready to move on to the practical. Are you starting with a blank slate by the way?............What I am thinking is that you would be happy with a woodland style garden as you don't mention flowers or colour but you do mention "hearing and smelling and feeling". If I am correct in this, and I don't want to put words in your garden, you can see how we might then move on to selecting trees, materials and trajectory of walkways hidden seating areas and so on. If I am not correct this still describes the process.

Perhaps the problem is what you want is a mature garden. You can't get that though without putting plants in the ground. You could have two years worth of growth going by now. You are seriously overthinking.
You can't do it all at once anyway. Start somewhere. Sounds like Privacy is an issue so start there. Someone said "Those seeds won't sprout in the envelope". I think that sums it up. Plant what you like. Start with a small area and add on, and on, and on....

My words are nebulous, yes -- I think so too. Thats one of the reasons I was trying to find out what sort of words *are* useful.

Heres what I am starting with: (These panoramas are distorted; the sidewalk is essentially flat.)

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Zone 7, Shenandoah Valley Virginia town. 70' x 40with a gentle slope from sidewalk down to house. Mature maple. Somewhat overgrown boxwood foundation planting. Short white picket fence (neighbors) on SE property line with 4 deep "little-of-this, little-of-that" perennial border on our side (which doesnt appeal to us). Mature dogwood between maple and house (enjoyed from side screened porch.)Our basement is presently nice and dry, and we want to keep it that way.

I agree that the backyard is traditionally the place for seclusion in these parts. In our case the backyard seems less suitable than the front yard. Its noisier (due to an alley) and more overlooked by neighbors (due to the slope) despite mature hedges, and is dominated by what I call the LOOMING deck. The deck is often heavily shaded by the house and we only enjoy it a few months a year. The back is a great open place for the kids (almost 5 and 7) to play; they dont seem put off by the alley or the spectre of the looming deck.

By contrast, the front faces a quiet dead-end street and has good south-southeast exposure. Both my husband and I work at home. When an minor remodeling is complete, my office window will face the front yard. The land slopes up slightly from the house so the yard is very visible from inside. We leave the front door open on sunny days in all seasons and let the light (and summer air) pour into the stair hall. We carry lawn chairs out there to sit in the dappled summer shade and warm winter sun. We'd like it to belong to us and not to the street.

Amazon, much of the above I didnt know 19 months ago when we moved here from the New Hampshire woods. I think there were some good reasons to wait to plant. If we had done what we were inclined to do our first summer here (find a place to park the car!) we would be regretting it now. And though of course only a mature garden will fully meet my needs as you said, gottagarden, theres a reward in waiting and watching it grow.

Ink, I do have a taste for woodlands. I used to live in a woodland, and now I spend an hour a day walking in woods not far from town. Thats how I get my "fix;" but here in town I feel I want something different: some formal lines, an obvious geometry, a few clipped shapes. The house seems suited to that, too. I close my eyes with the sun on my face and imagine Im on a narrow, low-walled terrace in Italy with my back to a vine-covered wall, facing an intimate enclosed garden punctuated by cypresses and great mounds of evergreen, and with just a glimpse of a distant view. I dont have the right climate or environs for that dream, but it gives you another idea of my taste. Though I like flowers, I really want the green and some hardscape and texture, scent, a beautiful artifact of some sort, and the red flittings of cardinals (the birds, I mean, not the red-hatted kind).

Ive already put a lot of consideration into some things: the circulation, sitting terrace, etc. But perhaps I should put that aside for the moment and free up my mind to consider alternate possibilities.

Please feel free to comment on anything.

There was a new thread that recommended this site. It seems like you might find something relevant here. (although I must say most of their work does look terribly expensive).

Regarding your neighbors on the right. They have a fence that seems to go all the way to the road, giving them enclosure and some privacy, if not a screened view. Do you like what they have? What would you change?

Thank you, gottagarden, I was looking at that site earlier. Their work is in many ways to my taste, although as you said, very expensive. The more intimate areas have something of the feeling I'm looking for. I'll look over those pictures when I have more time.

My neighbors with the fence have a very pretty garden -- with an emphasis on flowers. Much of the interest is along the outer perimeter, just inside the fence, and the low fence does give it a nice sense of enclosure. It has no mystery, however, and is all visible at a glance. I would like a higher, less transparent screen, and also at least two layers, you might say, so that what is nearest the house is partly hidden until you move closer. A real sequence that you have to move through. I'm finding this more difficult with the central walkway (which seems dictated by the house style).

I saw a reference to a thread from a while back that dealt with the limitations of a central walkway that divides the garden into two equal halves. I can't find it, though. Does anyone remember that, or can anyone steer me toward such a discussion?

Thanks for your help.