Learning to See: Four Questions to Ask Before You Design Anything

The four questions

One: how is this space enclosed?

Enclosure is what turns ground into a place. Look at what forms the edges of your garden — wall, fence, hedge, house gable, the neighbour's trees — and how tall each is relative to your distance from it. A rough working guide: once a boundary's height drops below about a quarter of that distance, you stop feeling enclosed at all.

What it tells you: whether the garden needs more enclosure (shelter, subdivision, a hedge across the middle) or less (a window cut into a hedge, a boundary lowered). Most larger Irish gardens need more subdivision than the owner expects, and most small ones need a gap cut somewhere so they do not feel like a lift.

Two: where does it want you to go?

Stand at the door and notice where your eye goes first, then where your feet want to go. Look for desire lines worn in the grass. Find the longest dimension of the plot and ask whether anything is using it. Then ask what the view ends on — a shed, a rotary line, a gap between two houses. What it tells you: where the main axis should run, and what needs to be put at the end of it.

Three: where does the light fall?

Go out at three points in a day and note where the sun actually lands, then repeat it in another season. Our light is low and the days short from November to February; a north-facing garden behind a two-metre fence receives almost nothing for a quarter of the year. Note also where light comes through something — a hedge, a canopy — because that is where a garden becomes beautiful rather than merely bright.

What it tells you: where to sit, where to put plants that want to be backlit (grasses, Molinia, anything with a translucent leaf), and where to stop pretending you can grow roses.

Four: is it the right size for a person?

Scale is not about big or small; it is the relationship between a space and a human body. Check the practical dimensions: a path where two people walk needs 1.2m, a bench needs 2m of clear depth in front of it, a dining table a metre behind each chair. Then check the plants: a tree that reaches 12m does not belong ten metres from a house on shrinkable clay.

What it tells you: whether the discomfort you feel in a space is a planting problem or a proportion problem. Usually it is proportion, and no amount of planting will fix it.

The twenty-minute observation

Do this once, properly, before you design anything. No phone, no notebook, no tape. Three phases.

• Minutes 0–7. Stand still at the place you most often look at the garden from, and do nothing. Do not tidy. Do not plan. It takes several minutes for a familiar space to stop being a to-do list and start being a place.
• Minutes 7–14. Walk the boundary slowly, following the edge the whole way round, touching it as you go. Look back at the house from every corner. You will find views you have never seen.
• Minutes 14–20. Stand at the furthest point and look back. This is the view you almost never see and the one that tells you most about the garden's proportion.

Then go indoors and write down only what you still remember. What survives twenty minutes without a notebook is what matters.

A short vocabulary

• Axis — an imaginary straight line the design is organised along, usually ending on something.
• Enclosure — the sense of being held by the vertical edges of a space.
• Threshold — the point of passing from one space to another: a gate, an arch, a narrowing.
• Focal point — the object the eye rests on at the end of a view.
• Borrowed view — landscape beyond your boundary that you frame and treat as part of the garden.
• Ground plane — the floor of the garden: grass, gravel, paving, planting.
• Vertical plane — everything standing up: hedges, walls, trunks, screens.
• Rhythm — the intervals at which things repeat.

Three Irish gardens worth reading for space

Visit these looking at the ground and the edges, not the flowers.

• Kilruddery, Co. Wicklow. The twin canals and the hedged allées known as the Angles are a masterclass in axis and enclosure. Walk them slowly and feel the space narrow, then release.
• Powerscourt, Co. Wicklow. Terraces, level changes, and the Great Sugar Loaf held in the view beyond the lake: borrowed view at full volume, a garden annexing a mountain.
• Altamont, Co. Carlow. Quieter and informal. Notice how the broad walk hands you down to the lily lake and on into the glen — a sequence of spaces, each with its own character.