The worst thing you can do with one of these little outdoor gardens is to clutter it up with little artificial props such as benches, bridges, and old oaken buckets. At all costs, avoid the cute and the trite. Practice moderation and the utmost restraint.
One prop—a hand-carved well-head, an alabaster birdbath, a lichen-covered rock—is usually plenty for any one garden. If it is handsome in its own right, the whole garden may be designed to set it off. If it’s a supporting element, play it down and let the plants stand out in the picture.
The same is true of streams, pools, walks, walls, and other miniature landscape constructions. They’re pretty and they’re fun to make; but just one too many can spoil a garden.
Naturally, any accessories and props to be used in a sink garden should be sturdy and weather-resistant. And as in any other miniature composition, proportion and scale are terribly important.
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.