LITTLE ROCK — Stepping through a garden gate is the first great moment in a visit to a garden: The gate swings closed behind you, and suddenly you’re an insider, cut off from the busy world.
For the time being, nothing else matters. “Here” is a sanctuary, an oasis, an escape. Her shady garden maybe just off a busy street, but it is quietly, securely and very graciously tucked away behind garden gate.
Garden designers describe the garden gate as a critical element in a garden plan. A gate marks an important transition: Like the front door of a house, it deserves special attention. Gates restrict access, but they also awaken anticipation. They are physical, visual and psychological thresholds.
“I like to create a point of constriction, a definite and distinct difference between the sidewalk and the front walk,” says Joe Hertzler, a garden designer and owner of Hertzler & George in Williamsburg,Va. He calls this spot a “pinch point,” but it doesn’t hurt - it directs the feet and the eyes, establishes a mood and helps define the spaces within a garden. “You come through this point of constriction, and it says to you, ‘I have now entered this room,’” he says.
In Hertzler’s garden, the pinch point is an arbor, covered with a native honeysuckle vine. The arbor is one step up from the sidewalk, and the flower-covered structure and the change in level give you the impression of having arrived.
His colorful front-yard garden is surrounded by a picket fence, and within the fence are two separate gardens: a neatly laid out vegetable garden and a perennial garden full of a tumult of blooms. The vegetable garden’s own gate, inspired by the tidy picket gates everywhere in Colonial Williamsburg, is drawn shut by the weight of a heavy iron ball suspended on a chain.
Julie Moir Messervy, owner of Julie Moir Messervy Design Studio in Saxtons River, Vt., says some garden gates have a “mouse hole” effect. A gate with an arch at the top frames a view and limits it, she says, so the experience of the garden beyond becomes more dramatic as you go through the gate. You can grow honeysuckle, roses, clematis or other vines to cover the arch, but you don’t have to. An arched gate without anything growing on it has a tailored distinction of its own.
A gate through which dog walkers and other passers-by can get a little peek is a neighborly gesture, Messervy says; allowing a glimpse into your sanctuary doesn’t take away from the sense of privacy you feel once you’re inside.
Calder Loth, an architectural historian, designed a clever trompe l’oeil gate at the back of his garden in the heart of Richmond. The formal gate, with classic wooden columns on either side and terracotta potsin niches on a pediment, leads nowhere: It frames a mirror that reflects his garden. “And here,” he says, “you step through the looking-glass.”
Since pretty gates prepare you for the garden within, the style and materials should match - or at any rate, complement - the character of the garden. An iron gate suits a city garden, but it doesn’t have to look like a security fence.In Virginia Beach, a gardener painted her iron gate a jazzy magenta; in Kansas City, Mo., a woodsy garden in an older neighborhood has a cheerful, bright yellow iron gate.
HomeStyle, Pages 38 on 02/19/2011