The minimalist garden

Today’s young professional hardly has the time, the patience or the space for large lawns, flowerbeds and complex, fussy garden features.

He needs a clean, smart and low maintenance landscape that meets his entertainment needs without too much hustle.

No other garden style matches these conditions better than a modern minimalist garden. As the name suggests, they are built around the idea that less is more.

The design is stripped down to its fundamental features only. Quality, rather than quantity takes precedence.

As such, they are as user-friendly as they come. You can relax, play and party without worrying about maintenance.

They are very much like an extra room in the house, providing the comfort and convenience of the indoors without compromising the feeling of being outdoors.

• .

  Keep Reading

• 
  Is this Kenya's biggest sweet potato?
• 
  Moi University is a lesson in the perils of tribalism
• 
  Farming restores peace in restive arid north
• 
  Embracing snakes and biodiversity for a balanced ecosystem

Clean Forms

Because of the need for comfort and convenience, minimalist gardens are designed for function. Designing one has a lot in common with designing an interior.

Hardscapes take dominance over plants. You need good flooring and walling finishes as well as comfortable furniture and décor to go with it.

But the most significant character of a minimalist design is that these functions and forms are reduced to simple and clean elements and spaces. Patios, furniture, planting beds, paths, water features and garden walls all follow this principle.

These elements are cleverly designed to serve multiple functions in the garden. Garden walls are particularly typical. They serve to retain slopes, divide space as well as act as benches and planters. Finished with ornate contrasting natural textures and bold colours, they are also important art elements.

Decorative lights are typically integrated to highlight these interesting surface qualities and add to the night-time ambience.

Materials

Material diversity is minimised and carefully controlled. Only two or three hardscape finishes are used throughout. Typically, a coarse material is combined with a fine textured finish along well-defined geometrical lines or a hard material contrasted with a soft one in a similar fashion.

It is common for the same flooring finish to be used on the furniture such as benches and tables. A timber patio, for instance, could be completed with timber benches integrated into a garden wall, which may also be part of a planter. This creates a sense of unity in the minimalist garden.

Industrial materials such as stainless steel, glass and concrete are particularly common. But natural materials such as natural stone, pebbles and water provide the balance and connect the extensive hardscapes with the natural world.

Plants

Although hardscapes dominate the minimalist garden and tie it together, plants are still very important.

They serve to soften and tone down the hard architectural elements in the garden. Hardy low maintenance plants are planted for their forms, textures and colour.

To maintain the simple and clean look, variety is minimised and tightly controlled. Small trees with interesting bark textures, branching networks or colour are used sparingly as focal objects.

Shrubs with ornate foliage such as bamboo, palms and agaves provide the skeleton for the planting beds. Alpine plants and grasses make for the majority of ground covers.

—The writer is a landscape architect