Lessons from a tiny garden

Sunset, Spring-Summer, 1998 by Sharon Cohoon

A typical backyard in a new housing development is about the same size and shape as a two-car garage. And it generally receives about as much attention. Most of us look out our patio doors, see the slabs of concrete and the few yards of dirt, and shut the shades again, quickly. These uninspiring little rectangles don't exactly resonate with possibility for us.

Landscape designer Phil Snow saw things differently. When he looked at the backyard of his condo in El Cajon, California, he pictured an outdoor living room, a dynamic water feature, multiple conversation areas, and tons of tropical ambience. He turned his vision into reality and fit all these features into a 600-square-foot space.

Tiny gardens need focal points even more than larger ones, since they have no sweeping vistas. Water features make perfect focal points. If your water feature is going to be a pond, chalk out various shapes until you come up with one you like. Then try to find a prefabricated polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pond liner in approximately the same shape - as Snow did in his own yard - or use PVC sheeting to form it.

Take special care with the finishing touches. Camouflage pond edges with rock or split flagstone, and use plant foliage to blur boundaries. "You want the pond to look at home, not like it was just plopped down," says Snow.

Once the water feature is in place, most of the remaining area will be people space. "A few seating areas and a walkway between them is about all you'll have room for," Snow says. In his yard, Mexican terra-cotta tiles, covering the original concrete slab, define one conversation area. Stone benches topped with flagstone, reached via a semicircular path, form a second. The curve of the path encourages visitors to venture farther into the garden. So do the see-through lattice fence and gate at the rear of the property, with their implication of more beyond.

Since the spaces remaining for plants tended to be shallow, Snow put in lots of vines - bougainvillea, violet trumpet vine, Carolina jessamine, and, in the shade, Boston ivy - and espaliered a pink powder puff and a red hibiscus against the walls. Then he balanced all the tropical heat with the verdure of palms and split-leaf philodendron.

"This little backyard has turned out to be a wonderful living space," says Snow's wife, Carolyn.

RELATED ARTICLE: 12 ways to make a small garden appear larger

1. Create a series of spaces. Divide the garden into smaller "rooms," using seatwalls or hedges.

2. Use mirrors. In the right place, a mirror can reflect paths and plants, making a garden seem to go on forever.

3. Extend the garden - with paint. An open gate or a garden, painted on a wall, can create the illusion of "spaces beyond." "A garden is an illusion, anyway," says landscape designer Jana Ruzicka, who frequently uses this device in small gardens.

4. Build a reflecting pool. Sky and plants mirrored in water can make a garden look larger.

5. Emphasize diagonal lines. Paving set on the diagonal, or an angled deck or patio, can make a garden seem deeper than it really is.

6. Change levels. Berms (mounds) and swales (depressions) visually expand outdoor living spaces, as can sunken or raised patios.

7. Conceal part of the garden. Make it seem larger by hiding the property line with dense shrubbery, and by screening parts of the garden from view. Revealing the garden a section at a time also adds mystery and expectation to the space.

8. Borrow scenery. Incorporate views beyond the borders of your garden into the design. Prune trees to frame a view. Or mound shrubs together to echo distant mounding hills.

9. Play with perspective. To create the feeling of depth, place large rocks and plants in the foreground, smaller ones in back.

10. Play with color. Dark foliage recedes, light foliage is prominent. A backdrop of dark conifers seen through white birch trunks, for example, creates the illusion of depth.

11. Visually merge outdoors with indoors. Using the same paving in a living room, loggia, or family room and an adjoining patio, with French doors between them, is one way to visually extend the garden.

12. Don't forget details. Viewing a small garden is like looking into the heart of a flower: the smallest details loom large. Make every one count. A large terra-cotta pot can contain a whole garden - annuals, perennials, and a shrub - in miniature. If it's an urn from Italy, it can also be a focal point.

- Kathleen N. Brenzel