Some gardens are purely intended as useful production units for fruit and vegetables, but these are – I believe – excessively rare. Even the most utilitarian vegetable gardener seems to plan their plot with at least a small regard for beauty or take some degree of pleasure in the inherent beauty of their crops.
There is, you’ll agree, a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ oh, so very special about a firm, young carrot.
For most of us, though – even if we do incorporate some productive elements in our gardens – the aesthetic value of the garden and the sheer joy of the beauty of plants and being under an open sky seems to be the main driving force when we plan, tend and think about our gardens.
My personal design aesthetic is heavily influenced by the couple of years I spent thinking I should be an architect (that phase passed after studying for a couple of years…), and especially by the Vitruvian principles of firmitas, utilitas and venustas. The idea that a building should be both durable, usable and beautiful in order to be succesful is appealing to me, and I somehow think of this concept as being transferable to gardening.
After all, we want our gardens to be beautiful, but we also want them to accommodate our utilitarian needs (a vegetable garden, a terrace, maybe a barbecue or a firepit) and last – but not least – while most of us are prepared to do a fair bit of maintenance, we also tend to desire the garden to have some durability; plants should be suitable for the local climate, pavements should be stable and trellises should not come tumbling down in an autumn gale.
So remember this the next time you plan an addition to your garden: Will it be beautiful, will it be durable and will it serve its intended purpose. If the answer to any one of these questions is “no”, then it’s back to the drawing board.
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A very good triangle, and balance between beauty and keeping us healthy with all the good veggies.
I guess I mainly see it as a “design guide”, so not necessarily something that involves health; after all, utility in a garden can also be space for outdoor cooking (and a barbecue is rarely all that healthy in my experience), but I guess that’s just an example of how we all read different things into a simple graphic. (Though of course in an ideal world we also want our bodies to live up to those three criteria… Thank God beauty is in the eye of the beholder, eh?)
Can we call it a health triangle as well?
Pheno, ABC Wednesday Team
We can call it anything we like, and if people find that it makes sense for them to think of it in terms of their bodies, then why not? (Though it does sound so much more glamorous to refer to it as the Vitruvian Trinity or some similarly high-brow phrasing.)
Interesting. I suppose I tend to lean, in most things, toward the function over the form, when forced to make a choice. I mean, I’d rather it be useful and durable than pretty and useless.
ROG, ABC Wednesday team
Even so, though… When given the choice, would you not rather have something that was pleasing to the eye as well as useful and durable? Pretty and useless is mere ornament, and though I wouldn’t quite as far as Adolf Loos, who claimed that “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects” (Ornament and Crime, 1908), I would certainly argue that ornament for ornament’s sake is a rather frivolous concept. I like beautiful things that are suitable to their purpose and doesn’t fall apart at the drop of a hat, hence my attraction to Vitruvius’s notion of the three components to successful designs.
Beauty, durability, utility. The characteristics of an ideal spouse, too. 🙂
That’s a very true observation!
Soren, I hadn’t heard of Vitruvius’s three principles before, but they really resonate in thinking about my approach to gardening. Thanks for introducing me to this conceptual scheme.
I generally find that so much of what I learned at the School of Architecture (before I dropped out…) can be applied to my normal life. After all, so much of what we do pertains to some aspect of design, and gardening obviously more so than most things.