In the last post, I hinted at vertical posts in the last photo, so - spoiler alert - that's what this post is going to talk about. But, first, let's talk about the importance of vertical height. If you take away anything from this post, I hope it'll be a slightly better understanding of the use of vertical height in general, not just in the garden.
I mean, let's start with the layout of this blog. I'm a software developer, and I've worked with a lot of designers over the years, and one thing that they all go on about is the importance of rhythm in any design. I learned that the details of how the font heights interact as you go up and down heading sizes is critical to having a clean look on a website. Making sure that the typography is pleasing comes down to having a rhythm and flow to the sizing and that includes everything from the height and width of the letters to the gaps in between letters, words, and paragraphs.
This sort of thing is so important that I don't handle it myself - for websites, there are a ton of libraries out there than can handle the small details of such things. The template that was the starting point for this design was Bahunya which itself uses a package called Shevy to do the heavy lifting with regards to the mathematics of having a pleasing vertical rhythm for the typography of the website.
This sort of thing is a basic component of any design, though. You'll hear designers talk about 'adding height' or having a 'vertical rhythm' in lots of different contexts, but we're particularly interested in that of gardens on this blog. In that context, adding height serves multiple purposes:
- Increasing your available growing space
- Drawing your eyes up, giving the illusion of more space
- Dividing the space into zones
- Obscuring parts of the garden to add mystery
- Creating shelter from the elements
- Adding support for other structures
- 'Borrowing' the surrounding landscape
There's probably plenty more, too, but those are the ones I've certainly picked up. While it's useful to throw in an obelisk or a trellis to grow things vertically, doing that naturally draws your eyes up so it's important to take advantage of walls and fences. However, it's important not to overdo it - if you have trellis everywhere, then it stops being a feature and just becomes the background. That's where the rhythm element comes into play. It's like with music, where sometimes the gaps between the notes are every bit as important as the notes themselves.
In my case, coming from a typical washing-machine garden, all of the height in the garden was around the edges. Fences, trees, and shrubs were all around the edges of the garden, and while I added a pond that's a low feature which doesn't add any height. I was also conscious that I wanted to better zone the seating area and separate it from the other side of the garden. To do that would require some sort of visible structure, so I hit upon the idea of building some sort of pergola structure.
Me being of the long-term lazy mentality, I didn't want to be re-doing this in years to come when the wood rotted away, so my original plan was to dig out a hole, fill it with concrete, and bolt down some post holders to the concrete. As it turned out, not being able to get hold of any of those things easily meant I made a slight switch to using spiked steel post holders instead.
This had the advantage of being fairly easy to sort out - hammer the spike into the ground, put the 100mm square post into the foot, and tighten the bolts. Easy. The top, though, needed a little more work, but I roped in my dad for an afternoon and we used a circular saw and a hand saw to do a half-lap joint for the top cross-beams. The end result was three uprights and a right-angled joint to make an L-shaped structure, which I repeated twice more so have a total of three.
The end result was this:
Vertical posts (Original Size Image)
This gave a more defined feel to the areas of the garden, and by adding some height in the middle as well as at the edges it helped the garden feel a lot more structured, and oddly larger. The next post, though, will show the next steps of what I did with those structures for the more long-term plan.
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