House, Meet Landscape: How Integrated Gardens Came to Be

While I think of this sway British garden layout has had on gardens across the Western world, cottage gardens and Arts and Crafts gardens come to mind. But the origins of some contemporary garden features can be traced even further back — to the 18th century and the English landscape landscapes of William Kent, Humphrey Repton and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.

Before Brown, the home dominated its environment. With his designs the home became an essential part of the landscape, accomplished by permitting the gardens to reach to the walls of the home in the shape of expansive grass meadows.

Though Brown and other landscapers redesigned the country estates of the landed gentry — remodeling the landscape, producing serpentine lakes and installing classical temples and follies — the connection of the home to its garden in general was greatly changed. Their ideas still influence our gardens today and can readily be transferred to our humble dwellings.

David Scott Interiors

Until the 18th century, British country houses were closely surrounded by formal, Classy parterres.The landscape past was considered as wild and untamed, therefore this enclosure around the home gave the householders a feeling of security.

Removing this horticultural barrier, thereby placing the home inside the landscape, has been a massive shift.

Jeffrey Gordon Smith Landscape Architecture

The House as Part of the Landscape

This contemporary home integrates the home with the garden, together with all the terrace and entry paving mixing almost effortlessly together with all the rough surrounding meadow grass and plantings.

Jay Hargrave Architecture

This home not only is put within the landscape; it’s become a part of the landscape. Instead of the landscape being interrupted with plantings around the home, the sinuous lawns sweep directly to the walls of the home.

This feeling of this house’s being one with all the landscape is strengthened via the serpentine driveway, which follows the landscape’s shapes on its curving pathway to the home.

Wheeler Kearns Architects

Lancelot Brown’s design of sleek undulating grass running straight to the home suits modernist housing in the same way it did the Palladian architecture of the 18th century.

The simplicity of this open expanse of grass running to the home really complements the minimalism of this architecture.

Giulietti Schouten Architects

A Move Toward Low Maintenance

Garden maintenance prices were as much an issue in the 18th century as they are today. Formal gardens required lots of expensive manpower, therefore losing the parterres and substituting them with simple meadows made fiscal sense.

When we use slower-growing and drought-resistant grasses that suit various lands and ponds, we could achieve the benefits of lower-maintenance plantings today.

Feldman Architecture, Inc..

Before the creation of the lawn mower, grass was kept short by scything or shearing — a very labor-intensive method. In the English landscape garden, large swaths of grass were abandoned as meadows or grazed short by sheep and cattle.

Wildflower meadows have gained popularity in recent years and can provide a fantastic setting for the most modern of buildings. The 2012 Olympic Park in London has been a fantastic example of how contemporary meadows sprinkled with both native wildflowers and exotics may set off state-of-the-art architecture.

Wildflower meadows need lots of patience and a fantastic quantity of research to select the ideal plant and grass blend for your requirements.

The Garden Consultants, Inc..

Creating a low-maintenance meadow is comparatively easy, with the growth of streamlined and lower-growing herbaceous perennials and the use of decorative grasses. With the current trend of Prairie-style plantings, it’s easy to see how this can be transferred to the meadow plantings of English parkland.

Letting the dense, almost lush, plantings to grow hard against those home walls once again puts the home right in the landscape.

Contemporary home architects

If meadow grasses and herbaceous perennials aren’t an option for your climate or location, low shrubs can provide a similar impact.

Once again because of plantings that grow directly up to the home, this home becomes part of its environment.

Tate Studio Architects

Desert states are far away from England’s green territory, but we could still see the identical ideal of allowing the home to blend into the landscape.

More: Let Nature Inspire Your Own Landscape: Grasslands to Garden

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