Many garden paths are ordinary, designed simply to get you from one place in the garden to another. Grass paths, the simplest and least costly type of path to make, appear in gardens so routinely that they almost disappear. Occasionally, though, you’ll see a path that stands out. The grass path below is an example. It…
Working on Timelines, the 3 km trail at Glen Villa that opened last weekend, started me thinking about trails and paths more generally, and particularly about the way the size, shape and the material a path is made of affect how we respond. What a difference there is, for instance, between the effect of a winding…
As the end of the year approaches, I’m thinking about transitions. In the context of gardens, transitions are often linked to paths. Paths lead you somewhere, either literally or metaphorically. They take you through different landscapes — meadows, forests, open fields — whose settings evoke different moods. They come in all shapes and sizes — grassy and gravel, broad and narrow,…
Today, when nothing for me but snow and ice is underfoot, I am thinking about garden paths and how they affect the way we move through our gardens. The material used for the path, its width, whether it is straight or curved, whether we can see where it is leading or not — these aspects and more…
Glen Villa is about the land and the people who have lived on it, me and my family and the generations that preceded us. It’s about the emotions that plants and objects arranged artfully can evoke in those who take the time to really look at what is around them. It’s about the land beyond…