THEMES AND DESIGNS
Many of the principles and suggestions for dish gardens and model landscapes in Chapter 3 are equally applicable to sink gardens. The design needs, first, a basic idea or theme. Will the garden be formal, or informal and woodsy, or simply an artistic arrangement of living plants with or without a piece of tree stump or rock? Should it be built around an important accessory, or will one plant or a group of plants be the center of interest? Does the style of the container suggest the style of the garden to go in it?
Since a sink garden is usually planned to have some permanency, it is particularly important to plan the design in every possible detail and, if at all possible, to put the plan on paper—and in proper scale. You can tell, before it’s too late, whether a tree will be too large, a fence too high or prominent, a grouping of plants too far off balance.
When you plan the planting, keep proportion and perspective clearly in mind. If the design is to have formal balance, arrange pairs of trees, clipped hedges, straight walks, and other elements with geometric precision. If the effect is to be informal, make sure the center of interest is off-center, with a large airy area or low planting to balance it at the other side.
In crowded plantings the beauty of the form of individual plants is lost. Be sure to space them so that they have room to grow without becoming entangled with their neighbors. To blend the garden with its container, plan to have a creeper or trailer dangling over the edge.
Artistic plant compositions are arranged, like dish gardens, with outstanding accent plants, low growers often around the base, usually arranged naturally at the base of a rock or around a piece of log or stump. Colors and textures of flowers and foliage are contrasted and blended as they are in arrangements of cut flowers. Setting the plants in the empty container and rearranging them until the best effect is achieved may save shifting them about during planting.
All kinds of landscape designs can be re-created, in miniature, in sink gardens. And the scenes can change naturally with the seasons of the year. One of my informal gardens has a basic arrangement of rocks, small evergreens, and ground cover. In spring, miniature narcissus species bloom; in summer, tiny annuals such as Ionopsidium acaule and perennials such as Erodium chamaedryoides roseum; in fall, small cyclamen species.
Woodsy wild gardens can also have basic, permanent plantings—seedling evergreens, moss, foliage plants such as small ferns, rattlesnake plantain, and pipsissewa—through which spring-blooming squirrel corn, hepatica, and spring beauty can push up their flowers.
One of the most effective formal-garden designs makes good use of miniature roses as a flowering hedge in front of a high wall at the back, or as twin specimens on each side of an arch. Other formal gardens adapt the designs of the Victorian age, or the Colonial gardens of Williamsburg.
Someday I want to try an Oriental garden featuring a bonsai-style dwarf tree and planted sparsely, in the Japanese manner, with tiniest shrubs and perennials and a ground cover of fine moss or sand, and perhaps a curved bridge over a still stream.
With a suitable container you could do an outdoor desert garden. Many miniature desert plants are hardy or semihardy and would live through the winter with some protection. There are many other possible themes, and many types of plants and containers with which to carry them out.