Serendipity in Garden Design

I have written previously about coming to understand principles of garden design –  including the importance of repetition (It’s Good to Repeat Yourself), of scale (Don’t Be Small-Minded), and of paying attention to foliage (It’s Not Just About Flowers) – by learning from my mistakes. But mistakes are not the only way to learn design lessons. In my experience, the most important element in garden design is serendipity.

Serendipity is the capacity to make happy or useful discoveries by chance. Because gardens are dynamic and plants grow and combine in unexpected ways, happy accidents are common in gardening; serendipity in garden design is the ability to discover the principles underlying those happy accidents so that they can be intentionally recreated.

When I designed the planting for the circular bed (above), I was looking for a way to use divisions of Geranium x cantabrigiense ‘Biokovo’ that needed to be thinned from the deck border. But I knew that I wanted more contrast than an outer edge of pale, frothy Biokovo flowers would provide. So I decided to interplant Biokovo with the deeper pink of G. x cantabrigiense ‘Karmina.’ And because I had already discovered (by chance) that the foliage of Alchemilla mollis (lady’s mantle)  echoes the shape of the G. x cantabrigiense foliage, I decided to break up the band of Geranium foliage with Alchemilla plants. When this planting bloomed the following June, I was enchanted by the combination of chartreuse and pink. And having learned from this happy accident that these colors are beautiful together, I decided to repeat the same combination of plants in the fence border.

The combination of pink geranium and chartreuse lady’s mantle along the front edge of the fence border was as lovely as I expected, but the planting also worked in ways I didn’t anticipate. There were new happy accidents in the way that these plants related to other parts of the back garden. The first of these gifts of chance was the way that the hot pink-chartreuse combination of Geranium ‘Karmina’ and Alchemilla mollis, growing side by side at the south end of the fence border was repeated in the chartreuse foliage and deep pink flowers of Spirea x ‘Magic Carpet’ in the deck border, drawing the eye across the walkway and creating a harmonious link between these two flower beds.

I also didn’t anticipate the way that, as you enter the back garden, the frothy chartreuse plumes of Alchemilla at the end of the fence border set up a rhythm with the Alchemilla flowers at the front of the blue and yellow border, moving the eye along the walkway.  Although I had previously thought about how to link different flower beds with one another, my efforts had consisted primarily of repeating the same plants in more than one part of the garden. These happy accidents have helped me to a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of how plantings can be visually connected. These lessons of serendipity will be very helpful in a few years when I begin to design a new front garden.

Not all my fortuitous discoveries involve geranium and lady’s mantle. I will end this post with one more example of serendipity, from the blue and yellow border. I have long enjoyed the display of blue created by the simultaneous blooming of Tradescantia ‘Zwannenburg Blue’ and Siberian irises (Iris sibirica) in June, and I have attributed my pleasure in this display to the repetition created by the color of the flowers and the shape of the foliage. This year, I finally realized that there is more going on in this combination; the simple three-petal structure of the tradescantia flowers is echoed in the more complex structure of three falls, three standards, and three styles in the iris flowers, and this similarity of flower structure is as important as flower color and shape of foliage in creating a sense of unity.

I think this discovery can help to resolve the tension that many home gardeners experience between expert advice to plant in big drifts and the desire to grow a variety of plants in a limited space. Although there are four different plants in the vignette above (one variety of Tradescantia and three different varieties of Siberian iris), the eye blurs the differences and sees a big drift of similar blue flowers.

For me, serendipity is not only a critical element in garden design, it is also at the heart of gardening’s excitement and joy. As long as I am gardening, there will be happy accidents to discover. And as long as I am open to those happy discoveries and the lessons they can teach, I will continue to learn and grow as a gardener.