About small spaces, many options and finding your own way
There is a trend towards densification in cities in Ontario, including here in the Niagara region. With that comes smaller garden spaces. However, people still want green in their living space.
The question becomes: what do you do with a very small space to provide greenery in your life?
There is an area in Niagara-on-the-Lake that features this pattern really well. The older homes in the neighbourhood have quite sizable lots. The middle builds, not recent but not old, have smaller lots. And then the newest builds have very tiny lots. You can almost see the smallification of green space occurring as you move through the neighbourhood.
I take care of two gardens there. One is medium-sized and the other is tiny. They are both small gardens by regular standards, and both have gone through several iterations.
Both owners have downsized, and keeping the gardens manageable is an important part of the design. In both gardens, limited space means thinking carefully about what each part of the garden needs to do.
A small garden is not about having too little space. It’s about deciding what you want the available space to do.
One way to do this is through layering: vertically, horizontally, and through time.
Use the space above you
The medium garden has a back garden largely taken up by a patio.
Lining the patio is a row of hornbeams, pruned to grow tall and dense. There is also a Japanese maple that is pruned to be narrow and grow upwards.
This is one of the simplest ways to think differently about a small garden.
Horizontal space is limited. Vertical space often is not.
A tree does not necessarily need to be allowed to grow equally in every direction. With the right tree and regular pruning, you can create height and greenery without taking up an enormous amount of ground.
The hornbeams also provide something particularly valuable in a small urban garden: privacy.
Beyond them is a privacy screen. Part of the screen is solid wood and part is a see-through wire structure. Clematis and honeysuckle grow on the wire, taking advantage of another vertical surface.
The result is not simply a collection of tall plants. Several things are happening in the same space. The hornbeams provide greenery and privacy. The screen provides enclosure. The climbing plants provide flowers and another layer of green.
Privacy itself also changes the garden.
The area beyond the hornbeams receives full sun, while the area immediately beside the patio can be deeply shaded. Those two conditions are sometimes separated by only a foot or two.
So even in a very small garden, you can have significantly different situations.
The privacy planting solves one problem and creates another. Now there is a shaded area to plant.
Japanese forest grass grows there, and we are looking at adding more shade-tolerant perennials for colour. The exact plants matter less than recognizing the new condition. The garden has created shade, so the next layer needs to be able to live in it.
Put more than one layer on the ground
A narrow bed does not necessarily have to contain one narrow row of plants.
You can plant tall, shorter and very short elements quite densely together.
In the medium garden, there are tall grasses with flowering perennials planted between them. In one area, this happens in a strip only about two feet wide.
The taller plants provide structure. The lower plants provide colour. A groundcover can occupy the space underneath.
Instead of thinking only about how many square feet are available, you can think about how many layers can comfortably occupy those square feet.
The tiny garden provides an even clearer example.
At the end of a row of narrow cedars in the backyard is a Japanese maple. Underneath it is a very small planting area. Brunnera grows at the bottom, a couple of small hydrangeas occupy the middle, and the Japanese maple forms the layer above.
It is a tiny area with a layered planting.
In a larger garden, these layers might be spread across several metres. In a small garden, they can occupy almost the same footprint.
Everybody has a year
There is another kind of space available to every garden: time.
Everybody has a year.
If you take advantage of bloom times at different points in the year, the same square foot can do different things in different seasons.
In the medium garden, ornamental grasses are cut down around February or March. At that point they occupy very little visual space, and the summer perennials have not emerged yet.
That leaves room for spring bulbs.
We planted crocuses through some of these areas. Sometimes as early as February, they provide a pop of colour while most of the rest of the planting is still low. Then the crocuses disappear as the grasses and summer perennials begin to fill the space.
The boulevard at the front of the same property uses the same idea.
We recently added alliums along the outer arc of the planting. For a short period they rise above everything else as purple balls, floating purple balls.
By July or August they are finished, and the fuller summer planting has taken over.
The alliums are doing two things at once. They use vertical space, rising above the lower planting, but they also use a particular window in time. They occupy that space when it is available and then disappear as the rest of the garden fills in.
You can layer not only in height, but also in time.
Design for now, and for later
Time in a garden does not only mean spring, summer, fall and winter.
There is also the longer time of the garden itself.
The front of the medium garden is a boulevard consisting of two roughly ten-by-ten-foot squares, one on either side of a pathway leading from the house to the road.
Boulevard planting rules vary by municipality, so it is worth checking local rules before planting one. Where planting is permitted, these spaces can be an important piece of green space on a small urban lot.
The original design had mature city trees in the centre of the two squares. Their canopies created significant shade.
The planting was arranged almost like an amphitheatre. Taller plants were placed toward the outer edges, closer to the road, while shorter plants were closer to the house and entrance. This provided some privacy from the street while preserving a layered view from the house.
We experimented with plants for both sun and shade to see what the conditions would actually support.
The garden answered us.
Some plants worked. Some didn’t.
Plants suited to shade generally performed well. Plants wanting more sun struggled or became leggy. One flowering perennial spread so aggressively that it eventually became overcrowded and was removed.
Then the two mature trees declined and had to be removed.
Because their root systems occupied so much of the squares, the removal disturbed almost the entire planting. We saved some perennials, but essentially we were given a blank slate.
The clients chose tulip trees as replacements, a beautiful tree native to Niagara.
But a young tree and a mature tree create very different gardens.
Suddenly, what had been a shaded garden was sunny.
That creates an interesting question: do you plant for the garden you have now, or for the garden you expect to have later?
You have to do both, but the present conditions come first.
You cannot plant a full-shade plant in full sun and simply hope that it survives for years until the trees become large enough to protect it. Sometimes the right choice is to use what works now and adjust the planting later as the conditions change.
Other plants can bridge the transition.
The sweet woodruff is an interesting example. It did very well under the original mature canopy. Now, with the trees gone and full summer sun reaching it, it struggles with summer scorch. So far, however, it seems to be managing. A midsummer cutback has been enough to tidy it and allow it to continue.
In that case, maintenance is the adjustment.
Eventually the tulip trees will grow larger and create more shade again. The conditions are moving toward the sweet woodruff rather than away from it.
Designing for later does not mean ignoring what is happening now.
It means knowing that the garden you are planting into is itself changing.
A garden is rarely finished. You try something, see how it behaves, and adjust.
The smaller the garden, the more visible every decision becomes
The second garden I take care of in this neighbourhood is genuinely tiny.
Its front garden is very minimalist.
There is a thin strip of grass, a framing of boxwood, Hydrangea paniculata rhythmically placed behind the boxwood, and a ‘Bloodgood’ Japanese maple providing the main height accent.
That’s essentially it.
Grass. Boxwood. Hydrangeas. One tree.
This garden shows another way of working with limited space: restraint.
You do not necessarily need to fit more things into a small garden. A few repeated plants can create a very strong structure.
When there are only a few elements, however, the details become much more visible.
My client prefers the boxwood to be hand-pruned rather than clipped with a hedge trimmer. I use secateurs to give them a more natural, textured, rounded shape rather than a flat surface.
It takes longer, but it gives the planting a completely different personality.
That is not to say that a square-pruned boxwood hedge is not equally interesting. There are other houses nearby with squared boxwood and hydrangeas behind them, and that works too.
The maintenance technique showcases the personality and interest you want.
Maintenance choices become that much more important when you have a very minimalist planting.
Furniture plants
The backyard follows a similarly restrained approach.
On one side is a row of narrow DeGroot’s Spire cedars that provides a tall green wall for privacy.
I sometimes call these furniture plants.
They provide the stable structure of the room while other things change around them. They look approximately the same from season to season and create a textured background. They do not need to be the interesting thing every week. They give the rest of the garden something to happen against.
The Japanese maple at the end of the cedar line repeats a plant already used in the front garden. Repeating plants through a small property helps separate spaces feel continuous.
There is also a practical layer. In front of the cedars is artificial turf, which gives the clients’ dog a durable place to move around without requiring them to maintain a tiny patch of damaged lawn.
Not every square foot needs to be planted.
The question is what you need that square foot to do.
A very unforgiving strip
On the other side of the backyard path, between the walkway and the garage, is a strip perhaps a foot and a half wide and twelve or fifteen feet long.
It is the sunniest part of the garden.
The request sounds simple: colour all season, nothing too tall, and relatively little maintenance.
In eighteen inches of planting space, those requirements become quite specific.
This little strip has gone through yearly iterations.
Blue fescue looked great during the first season, but over time became too scraggly for the space. Its strawiness and wild unkemptness might work perfectly well somewhere else, but here it became too visually dominant.
So it came out.
Black mondo grass disappeared visually against the black mulch.
It came out too.
Lavender grew beautifully.
In fact, it grew too beautifully. In the conditions in Niagara-on-the-Lake, it became almost twice the size expected and was impossible to keep within the available space without regular intervention.
So that came out.
These are three perfectly good plants that were wrong for three different reasons. One had the wrong texture for the desired effect. One disappeared visually. One simply became too large.
Other plants have worked better. Candytuft stays low and provides green structure with white flowers in spring. Yarrow tolerates the heat and provides vertical accents without taking over the path. Other small flowering perennials provide pinks, purples and whites at different points in the season.
I’m curious where this little strip is going to go.
It is very narrow, and it is very unforgiving.
That makes it a useful example of what changes as a garden gets smaller.
In a large bed, a plant that grows six inches farther than expected may not matter. In an eighteen-inch-wide bed, it matters.
A plant with slightly scraggly foliage may disappear into a larger planting. Here, it may be most of what you see.
The smaller the garden, the more precise the choices become.
What do you want the space to do?
Creative endeavours often become interesting when the constraints become clear.
A blank canvas can be scary. But imagine painting plein air when you know you have only a short window of sunshine before the clouds arrive for the rest of the day.
Suddenly, the constraint gives you something to respond to.
What choices do you make when each one matters?
A small garden offers a similar kind of constraint.
Making the most of a small garden does not mean getting the most things into it. It means making the available space into what you want it to be.
Maybe you want privacy. Maybe you want flowers from early spring until fall. Maybe you want somewhere for the dog. Maybe you want a green backdrop outside the window. Maybe you want something whimsical. Maybe you want a garden that requires relatively little maintenance.
The constraint makes those choices visible.
Once you know what you want, you can use the dimensions you have.
Horizontal space may be limited. Vertical space often is not.
Several layers can occupy the same piece of ground.
And everybody has a year.
A small garden is not about having too little space. It’s about deciding what you want the available space to do.