Marpa Landscape Design Studio Blog

Water is a magical element in the garden.  It brings movement and sparkle as well as stillness and clarity.

Bringing the water element into your garden doesn’t require a massive water system or tons of money.  One simple, elegant means of having water is in a small stone basin.  If you drill a hole in the bottom of the stone and plumb it to a small tank and pump hidden below, you can have the sound of gently running water at a relatively low cost.

Placing these basins close to an entry or along a pathway gives them maximum impact.  In this garden, the stone basin echoes the stone in the midground and the mountains in the background, helping to “borrow” that scenery for a small space.

Marpa’s president, Martin Mosko, has just left to spend a month helping to design gardens at Auroville, in India.  Auroville is a town founded to be a place “where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics, and all nationalities.  The purpose of Auroville is to realize human unity.”

Auroville was inaugurated in 1968 and exists as a separate entity within the country of India, owned by a foundation and run by a trust.  The people who inhabit it are from more than 45 nations, are all ages from infancy to 80, and all dedicated to this central principle of finding a way to live in harmony and unity, without greed or hatred.

The land is located in south India, and the buildings and gardens are laid out in the shape of a spiraling galaxy.

The center of the township is the Peace Area, comprising the Matrimandir (a huge central structure), and its gardens.

Martin will be part of a team which is generating designs for the first three gardens, called “Existence,” “Consciousness,” and “Bliss.”  It should be interesting to see how this assortment of people from all over the world choose to embody these concepts!

The contemplative garden draws you in with its seductive use of the elements: fire (plants), water, earth, air (the pathways and stopping places), and space.  Arranging these elements in the right proportions is important to the balance of the garden.

One way to work with the elements is to provide variations in height that intrigue the eye.  Generally this means using many different heights to offer contrast and interest.  A lack of variation is dull and sad, as in this front landscape:

Here you have only the flat ground plane and the trees, which are similar in height to the house and the entry pillars.  There’s not enough variation to provide interest or even a startling contrast.

Instead, think of using various heights to draw the eye into the landscape:

Here, the rocks, the trees, the waterfall, and the ground cover plants all play off one another and provide plenty of variety.

A landscape that feels as though it is a world in itself will pull in the viewer and engage all the senses.  Part of doing this successfully is to use repetition of shapes, textures, and colors.

Repeating shapes in plants is one way of accomplishing this.

In this garden, the mounds of ground covers repeat the shapes of the rounded shrubs nearby, reinforcing the gentle feeling of movement along this pathway.

In this park in Japan, the angular shape of the walkway zigs and zags in a pleasing way, drawing you into the garden:

The shapes inside the garden can also repeat shapes outside the garden.  In this sophisticated garden (again from Japan), you can see how the rocks and plants echo each other, while the trees in the foreground of the garden repeat the shapes on the hills beyond:

Another aspect of the “center of focus” is the pathway.  A path in the garden is a journey, which can be a dull one if there is nothing to see.

In this garden, the path may be functional, but we have no reason to believe it leads to anything and nothing to expect along the way:

In contrast, Marpa created this entry way with a clear center of focus.  The path promises to head toward something, even if you can’t see the front door from this starting place:

The “center of focus” of the garden is a critical part of the landscape.  The center is the heart of the garden, even if it’s not geographically at the middle of the garden.  It draws the visitor into the experience of the garden, and helps to engage the senses.

This is all the more important when seating is involved.  If you’re going to provide a stopping place in the garden, and invite someone to sit, it’s imperative that there be something to look AT.  In this little garden, the seating misses the mark:

The garden wall breaks the view and gives the visitor no reason to pause on the journey in or out.  If anything, it frames the view of the street very nicely–which is not quite what we imagine the owners were trying to do.

In contrast is this small garden in the same neighborhood, where the seating is correctly placed to view the center of interest: the big wagon wheel set among the flowers:

Here the wall is high enough to provide a backdrop for the wagon wheel, which is not even close to being in the middle of the garden.  Yet it provides the real center of interest in the landscape.

A garden that joins Heaven and Earth has enormous power – not the kind of power of a bomb or a racing car, but a Yin, or a feminine power. This is the power to magnetize, to seduce, to entice and enchant. The experience in the garden draws all the senses out of their habitual patterns and mental projections bringing us into the present moment.  We are invited to dance with the Divine.

We’ve been looking how best to build a “center of focus” for the landscape.  A garden without one seems empty and lost, and the visitor will feel cheated.

Often we try to build a center of focus with hardscape, either a patio or other flat surface with something at its center.  This can only work if there is a balance between the size of the space and the actual center of focus.  For example, in this small garden, the figure at the center is far too small for the surroundings:

Here is another “Taboo”–using a potted plant in a hardscape where neither the planter nor the plant is large enough really to occupy the space.  This garden also attempts to frame the center of interest with a different texture in the hardscape, but it doesn’t quite work:

These situations can be remedied by carefully considering the size of the center, as in this garden (note also how the surrounding plants echo the green of the center and help to reinforce it as the center of interest):