The Garden Circulatory System

When Garden Planning, Landscape Design, and Planning your outdoor areas you need to consider the garden circulatory system. How are you going to enter, get around, and exit the grounds?

The Garden Circulatory System, like the human body, has to have a garden circulatory system. By this means one enters and gets about in it. This garden circulatory system, embracing drives, paths, open terraces, and the like, is really the structure on which the design is hung. It should reach to all parts of the property, and where possible should make a circuit, so that one does not have to return by the same route. Often this circulation determines the shape of the various areas it traverses, and it is a great aid in establishing the coherence of the whole design by linking together its various sections.

The one indispensable part of this system, which must be considered even on the smallest place, is the entrance drive. Although this feature is constantly used, almost always in sight, and altogether necessary, it is often thoughtlessly and inconveniently arranged. Put in, usually by the builder, just after the house is completed, the necessary haste in getting it done promptly often leads him to do it rather carelessly just so that, somehow, anyhow, it is there when the owner moves in. Not only are practical considerations such as directness, amplitude of turn space, and details of construction slighted, but its relation to the rest of the scheme and its appearance as a unit of the development are totally lost sight of.

Before the advent of the automobile the purpose of the drive was to arrive gracefully at the door or preconceived and then pass on to the necessarily somewhat distant barn or stable. It could be narrow, curves might be sharp, plantings did not have to be kept away from it, for there was no danger of collision at obscure corners. Furthermore, the materials for construction could be light and cheap. Today all this is changed. The drive must be wider, more direct, and with broad, sweeping curves, if any. It leads to the door and then to the garage, which is either part of the house or located close by. Planting may not be allowed to obscure curves or the entrance. Turning space must be provided for in most cases, and heavy, durable, and dustless construction must be used. The first consideration in laying out the drive is directness. It enters the property; goes as directly as possible to its destination.

Aimless wanderings and meandering are an abomination. They look foolish, they are difficult to drive over, and they cause rapid wear and deterioration of the road metal at the curves. If the distance from the house to the street is a hundred feet or less, the drive should, barring difficulties of grade or the presence of invaluable trees, be straight. next page, more about driveways 1...

©2004 garden planning dot us