A "Look-Into" Garden
By Carole Ottesen

An often neglected aspect of garden design is how the landscape looks when observed from primary indoor viewing areas. Contributing writer Carole Ottesen offers tips for making your garden look spectacular from the inside out.

FOR MOST of us - even if we are in the garden every day—more time is spent inside looking out than the other way around. With this in mind, I thought, why not create “lookinto” gardens—beautiful little scenes to enjoy from indoors, especially during the long winter months? This idea was both practical and fanciful.

The fanciful part goes back to my childhood, to the spring my favorite aunt presented me with a confection in the shape of a giant, hollow Easter egg. It was decorated with pink and white icing and had a hole at one end. When you peeked through the hole, there was a tiny world inside: a house, a little garden, a wide-spreading tree with gnarled roots, and rabbits poking up among the flowers. I found it enchanting.

The magic of that perfectly enclosed little world from long ago has stayed with me over the years and certainly played a role in creating “look-into” scenes in my own gardens. But if that long-ago gift was the 10 percent inspiration, the other 90 percent was thought and labor.

The first thing I realized was that gardens look different when viewed from inside a house. That’s because, most often, we design gardens when we are actually in
them for movement through them to be viewed, perhaps, as we walk along a path from one focal point to another. Sometimes gardens are designed primarily for
the view from the street or driveway. In either case, being conscious of how your garden looks from the interior of the house brings a new perspective to its design and will help increase your enjoyment of it.

THE EPIPHANY

I started creating look-into gardens around my current house in Maryland soon after I began to escape the hot mid- Atlantic summer months by turning the
care of the garden over to my housesitter and spending time in a vacation cottage on the Canadian coast. Each fall, when I returned to Maryland, it was to a few
weeks of a diminishing garden. And then, all too soon, winter arrived and I was spending more time indoors.

What I discovered was that, viewed from the inside, my garden was lackluster. One of the primary reasons was that most of my plants were summer bloomers, so throughout the fall and winter, there was not enough to please the eye.

Like that proverbial tree falling in a lonely forest, summer-flowering plants go right through their life cycles whether or not you are there to see them. And if
you aren’t there, you miss the entire show. Summer is so gloriously awash in perennials and flowering shrubs that it is tempting to keep adding more, but it’s always best to exert self-discipline and aim for a mix of plants that shine at different times of the year.

This line of thinking led me to the bittersweet recognition that most of the plants in my garden belonged to a phase of my life that was now over. This
epiphany had a bright side: On the next trip to the garden center, the choices were clear. Any new plants had to be showy in spring, fall, and winter when I would be there to see them.

Does it flower in summer? No, thank you! Does it bloom in spring, fall, or winter? Does it have berries and/or outstanding fall color? Is it evergreen or does
it have an interesting shape or bark when leafless? Yes, please!

“It’s a long, long time from May to December,” goes an old song. But it always seems even longer from January to March, especially for gardeners. That’s when you need evergreens and the bark of crape myrtles (Lagerstroemia spp.) and stewartias; the buds of magnolias; and the berries of hawthorns (Crataegus spp.) and winterberries (Ilex verticillata). Masses of winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis), snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) or tommy crocuses (Crocus tommasinianus) can follow as cheerful reminders that winter is ending.

Finding ornamentals that shine in the off seasons turned out to be delightfully easy. Integrating them among the ones already in the garden was more challenging.


NEW PERSPECTIVES ON DESIGN

Looking out of my house, it also seemed to me that many of the long-established plants were awkwardly placed. To remedy this, all through the cold months, I would garden through the windows with my eyes, moving a shrub here, limbing up a tree there, expanding a bed to achieve more graceful proportions and, sometimes when it couldn’t be helped, removing a plant. By earliest spring, I knew what had to be changed and, with the help of the notes and sketches I had made, rushed outside to accomplish it.

With each change I made, the satisfaction level inside ratcheted up. To enjoy the garden from inside, you have to shift a point, or points, of view to the inside -
ideally to the places where you spend the most time. Then you’ll be able to enjoy your garden in a different way. It’s a bit like watching a sporting event on television: You’re not in the stands, but you have a much better view of the action...

Photo credits: Carole Ottesen
 

AHS members can read this article in its entirety by clicking here.

If you are not an AHS  member and would like to become one, click here.