Structure and Scale - L's garden

The beauty of this neighbor's garden is the orderly structure of stone walls, a stone bridge, hardscape and fine gravel (the right size, not the big pea gravel we have) paired with self seeded, loose, easy going plants and random groupings. 

She lives across the main road in the northern part of our development. Her home model is exactly ours -- the same footprint and layout. But her back and side yards are much bigger, giving her a lot of room and openness.

Some differences, though -- between the garage and the big dining room windows she has wide open space -- ours is bounded in close by the driveway and a fence surrounding our kitchen door.

Between the garage and house is a beautiful stucco wall with a blue gate. We have just the coyote fence enclosing a small courtyard. And her back patio under the vigas has been enclosed and made into a room, while ours remains an open patio.

Her deep back yard faces east, our narrow strip in back faces southwest. 

So it looks much different.

She has structure that matches the scale of her large space. She has big open sunny areas and shady compositions. The stone wall captures and contains specific areas.

That stone wall is the key structure that unifies the whole garden. It's an impressive piece of hardscape that curves and provides a soft ease to everything. Plants are spaced apart but don't look stiff or fussy. (Blue flax scattered about look naturalistic.) No crowding, and nothing looks skimpy. It's simple and soothing, all defined by that lovely sweep of rock wall.

Plant groupings are scattered about in front of the wall, but there aren't really paths. Instead, the groupings and specimens are sort of randomly placed, which gives the whole garden a relaxed, unstudied  feel.

But then there are very designed areas, like a stone slab bridge over a rock lined rain catchment near the house.

The red cement patio next to the rain catchment is huge, in keeping with the scale of this back yard. A patio table and chairs anchor it, set on an outdoor rug that separates the table from the expanse of flat stone  patio.

The big cement patio, lush greenery all around that hides any other houses, and the wide open gravel spaces tamed by stone walls and plant groupings makes this yard seem so big. It isn't really -- while it is bigger than most in our neighborhood, it's still a surrounded courtyard. 

But it hints at forest-and-savanna the way it is laid out!

She has space for specimen trees that can stand alone, not crowded together.

And space for an interesting shed that her husband built, and a vegetable patch with tomato cages.

Lots of structure, lots of wide open space, informal and easy but filled with generous hardscape. A garden with lots going on, but a relaxed feel.