Читать книгу Plant Combinations for an Abundant Garden - A. & G. Bridgewater - Страница 28

If your idea of heaven is a mix of woodwork and gardening, you are going to enjoy building features such as pergolas and arches. Just think about it – a nice bit of woodwork followed by lazing under your beautifully crafted garden pergola, with a drink and a good book just within reach, all perfectly enclosed with an impressive trellises, with fragrant plants and dappled sunlight all around. Pergolas, arches and trellises can all be used to create instant features.

Are these features easy to create?

A pergola weighed down with a vine creates an eye-catching feature as well as a very private area.

A ready-made arch is good for creating instant height, but plants will take time to grow over it.

Plant-covered trellises are a good option if you want privacy. Use a variety of different climbers to add interest.

PERGOLAS

If you want to create an instant architectural feature in your garden – a place to snooze and play in the shade, a structure for growing climbing plants over, and an eye-catching focal point – then a pergola is an exciting option. The visual impact of a pergola clothed with a wisteria, a grapevine or a honeysuckle can be absolutely stunning. If you are wondering if there is enough room in your garden, a pergola can easily be shaped to suit your needs. It can be anything from four uprights topped with a handful of cross- beams – just large enough to sit under – or a lean-to structure made from rustic poles, through to a substantial brick and wooden walkway that runs the length of the garden.

A lean-to pergola is a traditional option that is a very good choice for a patio area, especially in a small garden.

Radial-topped pergolas provide distinctive points of interest.

Climbing plants can be used to transform an old, ugly pergola into a striking feature.

A traditional pergola bedecked with wisteria is a beautiful, inspiring sight.

A porch-type pergola complete with lattice screens.

This simple pergola has been constructed using rustic poles.

ARCHES

Arches are functional in the sense that they can provide a support for plants, and of course they add architectural style, but a small, well-placed arch can also be beckoning and mysterious – an inviting route or gateway for your feet, eyes and mind to pass through. At the practical level, a wooden arch over a gate is a really good way of strengthening and bracing the gateposts. All you do is have posts that are slightly higher than head height, and top them off with a pergola-like cross-beam. If you have plans to create a romantic garden and like the notion of holding hands under a leafy arbor, then an arch in a hedge or an arch-like tunnel covered with a scented climber such as a honeysuckle is a good feature to go for.

This arch-pergola leads the eye to a focal point.

Here a flower-covered arch creates a secluded bower.

A rose-covered arch is perfect for a country garden.

An arch has been used to transform this plain doorway.

The trellis arch makes more of this simple door.

Arches in hedges can be used to create sudden and surprising entrances into other parts of the garden. Unusual shapes will create talking points for visitors, and can be used as design features to complement the overall style of the garden.

TRELLISES

While, at the practical level, trellises are no more than a structure or pattern of slender wooden strips used for supporting plants – as with free-standing trellises, or a trellis fence, or a trellis fixed to the wall of a house – a piece of trellises can also be an imposing and eye-catching architectural feature in its own right. In the 18th and 19th centuries in England and Europe, it was a much-favored way of embellishing the house and garden. One such design involved covering the whole outside of the house with a pattern of trellises, with the effect that the house looked delicate – like wedding-cake decoration. With this in mind, perhaps a trellis is the answer to the problem of hiding an ugly garage or a neighbor’s unsightly concrete wall.

False-perspective trellis

Trellis with “window”

Open-character screen

Integral seat

Greenwood trellises

This pretty little trellis feature is characteristic of the spidery rustic woodwork that was favored in the 19th century by gardeners who were trying to achieve a romantic cottage garden – a mix of an 18th-century French romantic garden and a pastoral sheep-and-shepherdess garden.

Fixing trellises to walls