***

Fruits and flowering trees and shrubs grow side by side in this little garden just off the Duke of Gloucester Street at Colonial Williamsburg. There are also flowers for cutting and grapes for eating. At one time, perhaps, the lawn was given over to neat vegetable rows.

Gardening space behind modest colonial town houses was scarce, and the colonists wasted none of it. In this garden, for example, which covers about 1600 square feet, over 1100 square feet are tilled. The beds are separated by brick paths for strolling, a favorite pastime for TV-less colonists. The geometric plan was in vogue in the eighteenth century and outdoor living was an unknown concept.

Today home grounds require a large terrace or patio, a place for automobiles and space in which to play. After these are provided, even suburban properties have space left for gardening, and in making use of this space we can take a tip from the colonists.

Rather than ineffectual beds and borders, hit or miss about a lawn, the colonial garden shows us how effective an organized concentration of plants can be. We can combine our rose beds, a strawberry patch, borders of iris and drifts of day-lilies into an important landscape unit, and depend upon trees, shrubs, hedges and fences to do such things as screen utility areas, outline the patio or reduce the apparent size of a parking space. Confined in a garden of their own, flowers perform to best advantage.

It is still a smart idea to locate a garden so it can be seen from the house, and provide it with either a visual or actual enclosure. Fences in great variety kept animals out of Williamsburg plantings, and today, while the animals are no longer present, one of the reasons we like Williamsburg’s gardens so much is that they have the definition that only an enclosure can give-definition too often lacking in many contemporary American back yards.

The time has come to erase any doubts you may hold on the subject of best apartment plants. Visit us for lots of free information at http://www.plant-care.com/apartment-plants-5-easy-care-houseplants-for-a-touch-of-nature.html.

***

Driveways and main walks to the front and other doors are necessary utilities. As such they may not be things of beauty. Therefore, they should be handled so as to attract the least possible amount of attention. To do this, devote as little area to them as you can, and that will also lower the total cost.

Avoid Curves

Remember that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. If a driveway or walk is only 50 or 60 feet long, it is best to keep it straight if possible. One that is unnecessarily curved is not ordinarily successful artistically despite the many illustrations of such curves which we see in advertisements. The only time a short driveway should be curved is when it has to pass around some natural obstacle that cannot be removed, or when the planting around the house is so arranged that it will look natural for the walk or driveway to follow it.

Obviously a person approaching your house should not have to walk beyond a point opposite your front door in order to reach a curved walk that will lead them back across the most direct line of approach. If your planned foot paths are inconvenient, various people ( including members of your own household) are going to take short cuts across lawns unless you take distinct steps to prevent it.

Service Walk

It is often necessary to have a walk come in from one side of the public area to the front door and then continue across the area out to the sidewalk again to handle the foot traffic of the mailman, paperboy, etc. In such cases, one section of the walk could be of a permanent nature; a steppingstone path or landscaping bricks could serve for the rest. Although used but little, the stones would prevent a muddy path from being worn into your lawn.

First Principle

A good general rule is to place walks where people would naturally tend to walk whether there was a path there or not. In other words, walks and drives should be placed so as to follow the lines of least resistance. Fail to apply the natural principle and the result will be unnatural.

For a greater understanding on the subject of landscaping bricks. Join us http://www.plant-care.com/1530-landscaping-brick.html.

categories: landscape,landscaping,garden,gardening

-