Lois de Vries' Garden Views

Secret #2: Reconnect to Your Inner Gardener I enjoy Garden Writers conferences. What's your favorite gardening thing? Do you feel like you’re going through the motions of gardening without getting much enjoyment? The sense of satisfaction we experience from gardening comes from within. Dissatisfaction is a symptom that we've become disconnected from our inner gardener. This discontent can arise from several sources. Someone or something outside ourselves can cause us to want to abandon our efforts. For example, if a garden club friend makes a critical remark about your painted flower pots that leads you to abandon what you had thought was a fun project, the enjoyment you derive from decorating flower pots could temporarily leak out of your life. The cure is to recall the pleasure you get from this activity and affirm that that is a good enough reason to continue doing it. Another kind of leak occurs when something that used to hold meaning for us no longer does, f...

Secret #1: How to Generate That Magical Quality What's your ideal dream garden? Have you been to other people’s gardens that seem to have a magical quality to them, but can’t seem to create it in your own? What may be missing is you. The heady atmosphere we encounter in certain very special gardens is a direct expression of their gardeners' inner being. A fortunate few are able to garden this way subconsciously. The rest of us have to learn how to do it. And that's good news, because we can learn to paint our landscapes just as we learn to paint a picture. The tools we use are the myriad of greens and greys that nature supplies as a background, flowers that come in every color of the rainbow, and the bark, foliage, and natural features that add texture. But the ideas come from inside ourselves. The ethereal feelings, or atmospherics, manifest as we invest important parts of ourselves in the garden. We have to be willing to expend thought, energy, emotion, time, mo...

My first post for Diggin' It , The Christian Science Monitor's garden blog, appeared at the beginning of February 2011, when I joined Judy Lowe's team of garden writers to share my knowledge about gardening in the stony clay of northwestern New Jersey and my thoughts about gardening from the inside out. It's been both challenging and fun to come up with topics during the dead of winter, when nothing much was happening in the garden beyond the slow crawl of our mini-glacier. There isn't any duplication of material between the blogs, so I invite Garden Views' readers to follow me on CSM, too. All of my Diggin' It posts are archived at http://bit.ly/hH2r8z . Despite its name, The Christian Science Monitor is not religious in nature, but rather a respected international newspaper that has won seven Pulitzer Prizes for national and international reporting. It was the first national daily newspaper to go Internet-only. Happy Easter!

It's hard to believe that the April issue of the Cultivating the Inner Gardener newsletter marks a full year of sharing my ideas about garden design with spirit in mind with my readers. I'd love for you to join these gardening enthusiasts and discover a new approach to your favorite pastime. Ground-breaking Ideas Each monthly issue offers subscribers innovative ideas about how to design a garden that is a sanctuary from the commotion of daily life. Together, we explore the rich potential of sounding our own depths to create gardening experiences that speak to the soul, as well as the practical matters of constructing our dream garden in the real world. Action Steps Action challenges for readers to work on during the coming month offer assignments for everyone who wants to get started right away. These run the gamut from summoning up childhood garden memories to designing the bones of your next garden project. All are intended to get you outdoors and reconnected to nature. Mo...

Meet me at Flower Fest on April 9th at the Ocean County Library, 101 Washington St, in Toms River, NJ, where I'll be presenting Cultivating the Inner Gardener, an illustrated talk that focuses on how gardening from the inside out creates a personal space that is not only beautiful and healthy, but also provides a sanctuary from today's hectic world. The presentation includes photos of gardens that hold special meaning for their owners and shows how they have incorporated their own values and fondest memories to produce a garden rich in personal meaning. Flower Fest is the library's celebration of the arrival of spring with displays from local garden clubs, horticultural societies, florists, and environmental organizations who will show visitors some gardening tricks, flower arranging, ways to have an eco-friendly garden, and much more. For more information, contact Scott Walker by phone (732) 349-6200, ext. 5914 or e-mail swalker@theoceancountylibrary.org .

 Informal design and balance  The irregular, curved lines of beds and paths in informal gardens contrast sharply with the geometrical lines of formal gardens. Similarly, the look conveyed by overflowing sprays of flowers, shrubs, and ornamental grasses left to grow into their natural sizes and shapes is strikingly softer than that of a formal box hedge smartly clipped into a perfect trapezoid. Among the styles of informal gardens are cottage, woodland, meadow, and wild. Despite their grand scale, gardens designed by William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll, Monet, and Vita Sackville-West typify our concept of informal design and the cottage style. Such gardens may appear deceptively casual, even though they have a definite underlying structure. Once again, making a choice between symmetrical and asymmetrical balance comes into play. The most easily understood example is a cottage dooryard garden. The beds on either side of the entry may be the same size and shape (symmetrically ...

Formal design can display  symmetrical or asymmetrical balance Classic formal design at  the Strickland Arms Bed and Breakfast, Austin, TX. Most people think of formal landscape design in terms of symmetrical balance. For example, in the first photo, at the Strickland Arms bed and breakfast in Austin, when you draw an imaginary line down the middle of the walk (the main axis), each side of the front yard is a mirror image of the other. Symmetrical balance Brick pavers in the foreground are laid exactly the same on either side of the central walkway. The yard is divided into equal-sized groundcover beds (drought parched the bed on the right), and further subdivided into equal-sized beds of grass as one approaches the house. What isn't obvious from this photo is that horizontal paths (sub, or secondary-axes) further sub-divide the yard at about two-thirds of the way to the house and, again right before the porch steps. All of the paths are bordered on both sides by ...