Let’s talk about this: What is a garden in life?

A few years ago, I wanted to build a living garden, an experimental greenhouse, in a corner of an orchard in Huairou, Beijing.

After several rounds of investigation and consultation, I found that the living garden I imagined was not a farmland where crops are grown to increase yields, nor a greenhouse for producing flowers, nor a green space surrounded by a lawn, a few trees and a fence, nor a luxurious hard-paved courtyard with sharp edges in a villa model room, nor a green belt on the road in the city.

So what is the garden in life?

The most direct inspiration always comes from the different places and experiences where I have lived, worked and traveled.

Part 1

I remember when I was traveling in the Scottish Highlands, I went to Kilchurn Castle, which was built in the 15th century and often seen in picture albums. I was lucky enough to stay in another century-old castle across the lake. The castle was decorated exquisitely and comfortably by the owner, but there were no exquisite flowers and plants outside the castle, mostly simple lawns or stone roads. If I wasn't too concerned about plants and gardens, I actually found that other friends and relatives would not care whether there was a garden here, because the lake view outside the window, the castle opposite, the surrounding ancient trees, the open lawns and sculptures are already the best scenery, just like parking in other places, but the parking lot here is for boats.

Kilchurn Castle on the other side of the lake


A century-old castle where you can book accommodation


Natural scenery outside the castle


Boats parked outside the castle and sculptures on the lawn

For this place, the best house and courtyard design is not to recreate small scenes, but to borrow scenes and integrate into nature. In fact, when the means of transportation is a boat, the house is an ancient castle, facing the lake and enjoying the natural scenery, there are gardens everywhere.

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If you yearn for a better life and have a romantic feeling, you will remember the Cotswolds, the source of inspiration for the English lakeside poet Wordsworth. I once lived in a farmhouse called Honeysuckle Cottage. Walking into a small path and entering a small gate along the hedge, the first thing is a front yard with not only lawns but also many flowering shrubs and perennial flowers. Entering the stone farmhouse, it is decorated with white, gauze, and floral patterns, warm and romantic. Walking from the side door to the backyard, there are not as many flowers and plants as in the front yard. Tables and chairs and red pottery pots with flowers and plants are placed in a distributed manner. There are also some lavender and other edible spice plants. Then there is an extremely open pasture with no boundaries beyond the fence, and several horses are leisurely wagging their tails.


(forecourt)


(backyard)


(pasture)


(The nice side door leading to the backyard)

For the owner of the honeysuckle cottage, living in a country house with a front yard next to a road is actually like some villas or first-floor courtyards in the city, which are next to the roads in the community. Through hedges or fences, an exquisite front yard garden is created to welcome and see off the hardworking self and family every day . For the honeysuckle cottage, the backyard is a more open pasture and a proud identity symbol of the farmhouse owner, but for the backyard garden in the city , it can become a place for the owner's identity, hobbies, and interests.

She lived in a country house, rode horses and herded livestock, so the country garden and pasture meadow were her gardens.


***

There is also the greenhouse in the Botanical Garden of Cambridge University, which you will never want to leave once you enter. Tropical plants, desert plants, alpine plants, aquatic plants... all have their own homes here, and the environmental control equipment is tailor-made for them. The old wooden structure and upward-opening windows, the glass windows filled with rain in the rainy season, the lingering water vapor in the greenhouse and the rich and diverse, rare species of plants make people feel like they are in another dimension, and walking in is like being drugged. The greenhouse here is actually a research greenhouse. Maybe it is a working garden for professors and students, but for me who was obsessed at the time, if I could have such a greenhouse in my garden, collect and protect my plants, and let me make some bold attempts, it would give me enough fun in my life . Such a greenhouse is the garden in my life.




***

It was these experiences that allowed me to find a corner of an orchard in Huairou, starting with an area of two or three hundred square meters, and build my own country garden. I can see the mountains not far away, and keep the hawthorns and plums in the orchard. There is a honeysuckle arch and a chrysanthemum path given by the villagers to welcome guests, a terrace with ivy and trumpet creeper to connect the indoor and outdoor, a wooden lattice pergola for gatherings and chatting, a vanilla garden and a one-meter vegetable garden to fill my stomach, as well as a rainforest greenhouse and a succulent greenhouse.








Part II

In Silicon Valley, California, I visited the home of a former colleague who lived in the mountains. The house was on the side of a mountain road, but was surrounded by natural scenery. There was a front yard made of pots at the entrance, and flower mirrors on both sides of the room.

The living room and the dining room have the same terrace with a mountain view, but they are different. The living room is mainly equipped with bookcases and sofas, while the terrace outside the living room has a pergola covered with wisteria. In this way, when reading in the living room, the green scenery around makes people more focused and comfortable . The terrace outside the dining room only has a pet room, and the mountain view outside is unobstructed . When the weather is good, people will sit on the terrace outside the dining room to eat.


(It was too long ago, and there is no complete photo, so the designer @张博赤 drew it)


***

Near the Bay Area, there are even more homes surrounded by fences and trees, but inside there are not just lawns and green spaces, there are often stairs of varying heights and plants, leading into the living room and dining room. If you go to a friend's house, after putting away the gifts and food you brought, you will first go to the garden enclosed by the fence in the backyard to chat or have a drink or two, waiting for the chef to call.

During this process, you can bask in the sun, hear the birds singing, and occasionally squirrels come to visit. Topics such as work or various stresses will naturally be put aside , and you can talk about the latest hiking route, or other delicious food, drinks and fun things.

In big cities and their surrounding areas, housing prices are getting higher and higher. Whether it is a villa or an apartment, people tend to pay more attention to the indoor residential area because there is room for appreciation, while the outdoor space is often a gift. Accustomed to the private life indoors and with the door closed, after living in the city for a long time, we have forgotten what it is like to have a yard. The yard is actually the best space for visiting friends, gatherings, and leisure time, which are not value-added but belong to the function of life.

In Silicon Valley, innovation and integration are eternal business themes. Food, meditation, gatherings, hiking, yachting, vegetarianism... the themes of life are changing with each passing day, and change is the most stable existence. Life's Work and Work and Life Balance are equally important. Therefore, the gardens here exist for the current lifestyle. They may not be gorgeous or even simple, but they are carefully in harmony with the interior space layout, style, and function, and are part of life .


***

There is another garden that always haunts me - the Robison York State Herb Garden in the Cornell University Botanical Garden in the United States. There are more than 500 kinds of herbs here, and the planting beds are made of local rocks. It was originally a garden given by a husband to his gardener wife.


(A corner of the herb garden)


(The lawn side of the herb garden)


(Experimental vegetable garden opposite the herb garden)


For a gardener who actively chooses and truly loves his profession, he knows better than most people how to get along with plants, how to water, fertilize, prune and take care of these plants. This is not something ordinary people can do. Dealing with plants every day is her life. Therefore, a garden with such a variety of colors is the gardener's garden.


***

For us, private garden design projects are not only a comprehensive consideration and utilization of existing site conditions such as outdoor space, light, soil, etc., but also an exploration and discovery of life.


An owner who is keen on being self-sufficient and eating the vegetables he grows himself needs to properly handle the relationship between the area occupied by growing vegetables and flowers, and the relationship between practicality and beauty ;

An independent woman who needs to balance family and work needs a garden to bring nature, rest and relaxation to the family, and she also wants the garden to be neat and tidy and easy to maintain ;

A daughter who wants her retired parents to enjoy their old age and cultivate their hobby of gardening hopes that the garden space can be reasonably laid out to leave space for plants of different heights, colors, and growth patterns , and also to be convenient for her parents to use .

A mother who devotes all her time and energy to her family and raises her children with care needs a space in the garden for her children to play . Who knows one day the grapes or pomegranates her children sow may grow into a small tree, which is more joyful than any precious tree. Maybe she also needs a green and peaceful wall that can be seen from the window.


Part III

In New York, I met a girl who graduated from Cornell University with a degree in environmental science. She loves nature and plants and is also a model. She lives in a Brooklyn apartment. There are hundreds of plants in her two-bedroom, one-living-room home. She also keeps a chicken named Kippetje as a pet. She has a lot of equipment, such as light and moisture sensors, water-absorbing and water-retaining pads, and automatic irrigation facilities. We can talk for a long time about the relationship between the performance of these equipment and plants. One of the southeast bedrooms is mainly used to grow foliage plants ; another bedroom is separated into a room to be used as a studio for the photographer boyfriend, so a fiddle-leaf fig supports the entire space ; and the kitchen has many bottles and jars of shade-tolerant plants, which perfectly blend with the food atmosphere ; the Bohemian style decoration in the living room is comfortable and free, and the plants are integrated with the accessories .





Downstairs from the apartment, there is our favorite boutique cafe, Devocion. It’s a ten-minute walk to the urban farm by the river, and a ten-minute walk to a farm-direct vegetarian restaurant. There are different exhibitions and gatherings every day.

For a busy but leisurely freelancer living in a Brooklyn apartment, although there is no lakeside castle, pastoral ranch, herb garden, front yard or backyard, the indoor oasis is her garden.


***

Therefore, we are also keen to help individuals, businesses, and companies design and realize such indoor oases. A 30-square-meter space can allow girlfriends to meet in a small forest; or a few elegant dragon blood trees, matched with good furniture, can bring the atmosphere of an American Ivy League school to an office in the center of Beijing.


Forest Living Room


(Floating Studio)


(Indoor Tea Garden)


(Beijing Center of an Ivy League School)



Part IV

In fact, in New York, there are many more people who may not have an indoor oasis, but on their porch steps or in hanging baskets in front of the windows, interesting potted plants make up their gardens. There are also community gardens throughout the city, with one every few blocks. They are the social responsibility of the city and a shared garden for urban residents. Whether growing vegetables for daily supplies or planting flowers and arranging flowers, working in the community garden for one day or half a day a week satisfies their longing for nature, greenery, self-sufficiency and a desirable life.


(On the street near Columbia University, an old lady who needs a tracheotomy every day due to illness is very proud of her potted garden)


(A random shot on a street in Midtown Manhattan)


(A corner of a community garden in New York)


(A corner of a community garden in New York)

***

So we worked with several architects to build a rooftop garden and greenhouse on a rooftop near the Second Ring Road in Beijing, providing a space for people working downstairs and city residents to relieve stress, escape confusion, and reshape their daily lives. We built a Live Off Grid lifestyle, practiced the core concepts of green ecology, self-sufficiency, and co-construction and sharing, and used the gifts of nature to communicate with the world, providing another possibility for everyone's life. The rooftop attracted celebrities to shoot blockbusters, the world volleyball champion came here to propose marriage, and countless people held birthday parties...






These constitute my understanding of the “Garden in Life” and become the most original inspiration and material for our design of the “Garden in Life”.

The garden of life,

It reflects different lifestyles of different people.

It is also an expression and realization of the life we yearn for.

More than 70 years ago, Thomas Church, the pioneer of modern American gardens and the founder of the "California Garden" style of modern gardens on the West Coast, wrote about garden design in life in the book Gardens Are For People . Roughly translated:

It would be a mistake to design a garden with natural plants that require expertise and professional maintenance for someone who is not crazy about gardening, and to design a garden with all hard paving and no soil to dig and plant for a real "green finger".

The future direction of garden design development depends on what the garden owner wants to find happiness in the garden.

Under limited conditions, the garden will bring happiness by increasing the beauty and eliminating troubles. The limit of garden design is the limitations of the site where the garden is located, but it is also an opportunity, and of course, the ability of the garden owner and designer to break through the limitations or take advantage of the site conditions.



For us, garden design in life should make the best use of site conditions and the resources provided by the garden owner to increase the beauty of the garden, reduce unnecessary troubles, and make the garden bring happiness.

The goal of garden design is to help everyone continue or present their current lifestyle in the garden , or to open the door to the life they desire. If the owner of the garden "doesn't seem" to know what he wants, then we are just helping you find yourself, help you believe in yourself, and feel your own life and the life you desire.

Garden design is just a starting point.

Start a new life with more people.

And accompany everyone to realize and enjoy this kind of life,

It's our fun.


Let’s talk about it together. What does a garden in your life look like?

Landscaping