Principles | Compatibility | Water | Courtyard
COURTYARD
A beautifully landscaped garden enriches your life and adds value to your home by extending the living areas to outdoors. A courtyard is the ultimate outdoor room, where with the addition of a table and chairs, you can dine for 9 months of the year. Add furniture for relaxing in, plants to give privacy and beauty, and you have a haven that can be created anywhere. Your courtyard haven can comprise of a small scale city garden, or be created by partitioning off a larger garden.
LIFESTYLE
A busy lifestyle need not exclude you from having an oasis of beauty and tranquillity in your backyard. If your property is large, and you have little time for maintenance, the simple solution is to clear and screen off a small area. A smaller courtyard area will not consume your time with maintenance, allowing you to enjoy your time pottering about in a tranquil oasis within the jungle.
You should note the position of the sun at different times of the day and locate your seating area where there is cool shade when it is the hottest. When planting for privacy, take care not to inhibit the natural breezeways and allow for gaps where there is a pleasant view. Keep your planting design simple and use a minimum of plant species. Remember visual impact is the greatest when you use bold plantings of 1 or 2 species.
A good screening plant with little or no maintenance that fits easily into many styles of garden is "Aussie Compact" [Syzigium australe]. This plant is a Lilly Pilly and only grows 3-4 metres high, does not require pruning, and is not attacked by the phsillid insect [this insect makes pimples on new growth]. Planted 1 metre apart, it creates a fantastic private green wall for your courtyard.
HARMONY
Wherever possible, it is important to create a strong indoor-outdoor flow between your courtyard garden and your home. Decking can provide a pleasant functional space that can easily be enjoyed within your courtyard and lines of decking can visually lengthen your garden space. When it comes to ground level it pays to keep things simple. This essential single element is a reference point for the rest of the garden, so choose pavers, slab, decking or pebbles but do not include intricate patterns and colour combinations.
If you are lucky enough to have neighbours with large trees and shrubs on your boundary, you can borrow your neighbour's landscape. This is achieved by planting a wall of smaller trees and shrubs that link to your neighbour's larger specimens on the boundary. Planting in this way creates a visual trick whereby the eye is less able to register where your garden form begins and ends. Thanks to your neighbours, your garden now takes on a more impressive dimension.
There are several other tactics you can employ that help break up any monotonous box-like perspectives within your courtyard garden design. You can alter levels around your courtyard garden by raised seating and planting beds to create a visual contrast to flat levels. Raised beds can double as seating by adding capping to the top of the beds walls. Larger plants in the foreground with smaller plants at the rear create a false perspective of greater depth for your courtyard garden. Pergolas add a further dimension by taking the garden up and shade can be provided by climbers or slatted roofing.
So to make your courtyard work, allow space to be a feature as much as the furniture and plants you use in the courtyard. Keep the plantings simple with just a few blocks of colour in pots, do not use too much colour in a small space. Use foliage to create textural combinations that reflect the style you want to achieve and remember use a plant for a place, not a place for a plant.
|
