Hard Landscaping For Finished Gardens

Hard Landscaping For Finished Gardens

Hard Landscaping For Finished Gardens

What is hard landscaping? Basically, it's anything that doesn't qualify as grown. So if you have a garden full of plants, flowers, trees and so on (all organic matter, which is referred to as soft landscaping), then everything else all the garden furniture and whatnot would be the hard part of the landscaping process.

The term applies to anything made, "artificial", or other wise non organic. A shed would be hard landscaping: as would paths, patios, gazebos and decking. Using lights to highlight parts of the garden at night qualifies, too the lights are deliberately placed to draw artistic attention to trees and shrubs, which means they have been introduced as part of the overall garden design without having been planted and grown.

What's the point of adding hard elements to the landscape of a garden? In effect, hard landscaping "finishes" a garden in the same way that a frame finishes a picture. When one thinks about it, a garden without hard furniture, paths, borders and so on really isn't a garden at all. It's just a patch of land with flowers in it. Given that the primary element of gardens the things that makes gardens what they are in the first place is design, then the introduction of non-grown objects to the space allows the gardener to frame his or her design. The hard landscaping elements of the garden draw attention to the fact that it is a garden. Without them there would be no way of telling where the garden starts and finishes nor would there be any way of working out where one is supposed to sit, where to look and where not to go at all.

Given that the types and variations of hard garden furniture (by furniture, anything man made is implied not just seats and tables) are practically limitless, a gardener is trammelled only by his or her imagination when it comes to framing the natural picture they have created. Just as a picture frame can have a huge effect on the way a picture is perceived, so hard landscaping can have a pretty big say in the way a garden is viewed.

A garden framed with mostly modern elements canvas shaded areas, steel poles, aluminium chairs "claims" its owner as a modern sort of person. While a garden that has been hard furnished with wooden items, like decking, gazebos and pagodas, speaks of a more traditional frame of mind. One would expect to find modern plants (cacti, for example, and palms) in a garden furnished in the modern style whilst older styled gardens might feature apple trees and strawberry plants. The point is, the hard landscaping in the garden gives strong pointers as to the intentions of the gardener, which is pretty much the same thing as giving an expectation of the kind of things one would expect to find in the finished article.

A modern picture looks awful in an old gold frame. An old picture would be dreadfully presented in aluminium. A garden is a living picture: the best way to frame it is by using hard furniture that fits the overall design.

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