When Sandra Gibson bought a home in The Annex, a quiet, historical neighbourhood in central Toronto, she found herself saddled with a four-metre-square, north-facing front yard overshadowed by an immovable city tree. A floppy English flower garden wouldn't grow there. Even grass was out of the question. A few of her neighbours in this similar landscaping predicament have opted to simply cover the area in brick and be done with it. Gibson's son, however, has been studying landscape design at schools in New York and Paris. He talked her into installing a formal French garden.
"At first I thought, no, everybody and his dog is doing that on our street," says Gibson.
And she's right. Up and down her block, the formal French look is catching on with a number of young urbanites who've decided not to gamble on the lawn. In upscale neighbourhoods like the Annex, Forest Hill and Rosedale, grass is becoming passé and the formal French garden (in front of the house, no less!) is coming up rosiers.
"It's a beautiful and interesting way to decorate the front of your home," says Toronto landscape architect Christopher J. Clayton, "and it's a bit of a trend with people who want something beautiful and restive to look at, but don't want to have to touch it."
"French is in," notes Jennifer Reynolds, manager of Summerhill Nursery & Floral. She should know. Like Clayton, Reynolds has been installing an ever-increasing number of formal gardens in front of Toronto's toniest addresses. "It's in with busy people who want the design and the comfort of beautiful landscaping but don't know anything about gardening and don't want something that has heavy maintenance," she says.
Clayton agrees: "It's not a garden for suburban families, for children, or roughhousing or people who generally like getting their hands dirty."
As it turns out, the classic elegance of a formal garden is deceptively simple to maintain once established and is often the ideal solution for undersized or underlit front areas. When done well, a formal garden can feel like an extension of the home, another room that invites outdoor living or purely visual pleasure.
Geometric precision, restrained planting, a classical focal point, and the "parterre" are the cornerstones of formal gardening. A parterre is a flowerbed divided into a geometric pattern of compartments. These compartments are often edged with low, carefully-trimmed hedges of boxwood, English yew, santolina, cyprus, or bay and are filled with uniform masses of annuals, perennials, herbs, low shrubs or gravel.
Originally developed during the Italian Renaissance, formal gardens were used to glorify palaces, casinos and villas. To frame their often elaborate outdoor fountains and statues, the Italians employed a highly geometrical approach to garden design using ancient Egypt's orderly grid system of planting as their inspiration. The Italians carefully selected colours, plant combinations, and themes to maintain artificially tidy patterns and classic forms.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the French adapted the Italian style of gardening, reducing the scale of the gardens while exaggerating the fanciful geometry. Like their Italian predecessors, French parterre gardens were typically focussed around a central ornamental element, with the parterres groomed into delightful little interlocking puzzles of low, compact plants separated by precise lines of gravel pathways.
Often, a modern formal garden has a specimen tree, a stone bench, or a classical urn as its focal point. "Urns are so big right now," says Reynolds. "Concrete urns or stone urns. They're really beautiful and durable, and most of them aren't very frou-frou; they're just nice shapes."
Not all urns are alike, however. "Cast iron is so out! It's so out," says Reynolds emphatically. To prove her point, she notes that urn theft has become an enormous problem in Toronto. "It's hilarious. They steal the stone urns. They're like the heaviest things you could ever imagine, but no one steals cast iron urns. That's how you know concrete ones are better," she says with a laugh.
Fragrance is also an integral part of formal garden design. The smell of miniature roses, Korean lilac, lavender and rosemary enhance the tranquil, calming effect of the garden's balanced curves and geometric lines. "It's nice for entertaining," says Reynolds, "and it's so relaxing. There's this whole trend of taking more time for yourself and taking time to smell the flowers. Well, you don't have to walk to a park to do it; you can have it right in your front lawn. You can have your tea outside and smell the scent of lavender while you're sitting on your front porch."
The decision to enhance your lifestyle with a formal garden is not one to be made lightly. Because of the intricacy of the design involved and the precise coordination of plants required, starting a formal garden is not for the weekend gardener, the faint of heart, or the financially challenged. "If you're going to do it, you can't scrimp on it," advises Reynolds. "You have to consult somebody and spend the money and do the whole thing all at once. These gardens just doesn't look good if you try to do it a little bit at a time over the span of five years. It has to be completely finished or it looks terrible. People always try to do it on their own and they always pick the wrong plants and they make a mess of it."
Although it can be done for less, Reynolds says it's not unusual for formal gardens to cost upwards of $75,000 to install. Even for Sandra Gibson's tiny front yard, professional landscapers gave her estimates of $10,000. Luckily, the budding landscape designer in her family saved her a lot of money.
Gibson's son designed a simple cross arrangement of parterres filled with bugleweed, woolly thyme, and creeping baby's breath all edged in low hedges of boxwood. "My problem is there's no light here but I like having green all year round," says Gibson.
According to Clayton, boxwood is a good choice in Gibson's situation. "Boxwood's a plant that keeps its leaves for most of the year and retains its shape and the design you're after. It's the same with the yew. If you use anything else, you're into a lot of regular clipping and pruning -- which was fine in 1500s France, when they had lots of cheap labour to keep everything clipped and pruned within an inch of its life, but not in this day and age."
Even with her initial misgivings about going French, Gibson is now quite delighted with the new formal look of her front yard. "Lots of people have stopped and asked about it." she says.
Then she adds almost as an afterthought: "And it's not as pretentious as I thought it might be."