Framing a Garden View From Inside the House

Views of the garden from indoors get far more use than most planting plans allow for, because many more hours are spent looking at a garden than standing in it. That's especially true of small and medium sized plots in this country, where the window ends up being the main way the garden is experienced for months at a stretch.

Framing that view comes down to deciding where people actually sit, working out what the opening lets them see, and choosing what holds the picture together once the borders have gone over. Those three things settle most of it, and none of them means redesigning the garden from scratch or spending heavily on hard landscaping.

Start From Where You Actually Sit

Sit down in each room and look out before moving anything at all. Eye height from a sofa is around 1.1 metres, from a dining chair slightly more, and both sit well below the standing view you get while planning at the window. The kitchen is the exception, since you're usually standing at the sink or the hob and seeing over the top of anything low, so the two rooms often need different things doing outside them. Designers often argue for planting close to the house rather than pushing everything out to the boundary, precisely because whatever sits nearest the glass is what fills the frame from a chair indoors.

The Opening Decides How Much You See

Window width sets the limits long before any planting does, since a narrow casement gives you a slice of border, whereas modern bow windows curve outward and pick up a much wider angle across a scheme, along with light arriving from more than one direction. Before changing anything, it's worth checking:

• cill height, since a high cill cuts off low planting completely

• the width of glazing bars and how much they break up the view

• whether the frame lines up with a path, tree, gate or opening

• how much boundary fence or wall the aperture takes in

What Holds the View Together

Evergreen structure carries a view through the months when borders are bare, which is why an evergreen framework of clipped shapes, low hedging and a few well placed shrubs does more work than a scheme built around a July peak. Give the eye something to land on at the far end, whether that's a large pot, a bench or a single multi-stemmed tree, and keep the ground between the window and that point reasonably open so the view keeps its depth rather than flattening. Colour behaves differently at distance too, because deep reds and purples tend to disappear against soil and shadow once you're twenty feet away and behind glass, while whites, pale yellows and silvery foliage carry all the way back to the house on a dull day.

Small Changes Worth Making First

Clean glass changes more than people expect, and so does clearing whatever has accumulated along the cill over the winter. After that, thinning one overgrown shrub, moving a pot and lifting the crown of a small tree will usually improve things more than a new border would. Look again from the chair you use most often, at the point in the year when the garden looks its worst, and make decisions from there.

This is a collaborative post and the author's views do not necessarily reflect those of our blog. We may receive monetary compensation for our endorsement and or recommendations