Modern Garden Décor

When we talk about modern garden décor, we are literally talking about décor. Décor is a phenomenon; the ground and center of a garden’s aesthetic. The modern garden is no different than any other garden in this respect. What makes it unique is the type of décor we find within it. It departs from the organic aesthetic that we normally visualize when we picture a garden in our minds, and it ventures instead into the realm of the unknown and the abstract. Using modern materials and basic geometric forms, its seeks to establish a purely mental awareness of itself as a uniquely human realm overshadowing the former realm of Nature.

This does not mean that modern garden decor departs from the principles of beauty and proportion. On the contrary, it seeks to establish beauty and form with accoutrements that function like jewelry on the landscape. Any number of materials can be used to create complex forms out of geometric shapes. Simple shapes are the building blocks of simplicity which help convey the impression of beauty in latent form. The rest is up to the designer to create new realities of form by skillful combinations that represent new or innovative points of view.

While the materials vary widely and the potential number of forms is only limited by the extent of the designer’s imagination, there is an attribution consistent throughout that can be immediately recognized as modernesque in its intention. Clarity and light are consistently represented in all of the many types of modern garden element by the polish and sparkle that appear on the surfaces of the forms themselves. Either the landscape designer chooses a material that by its very nature shines, or the designer polishes its surface and positions it in such a way that it always brings light to the occasion in some respect.

Some of the shapes we find here originated in ancient times and have been expressed in new ways to reflect our current world. The old image of the pillar or obelisk is something we have all seen in films and stories about the distant past. Such monoliths are often depicted rising up from the earth out of places of stone, fire, and rock, or at other times, water and greenery. It is no different in today’s modern garden décor.

We can take a steel post or stucco column, polished and gleaming, and position it in the midst of gravel beds, hardscape structures, or Spartan plantings of dark green ground cover.. Steel walls can be used to frame a garden or to hang objects. Such an image conveys a sense of magnitude, or even possibly suggests that which is monumental. Placed in relationship to a contemporary style home or modern office building, it commands attention an attention and focus that in turn is transferred to other forms.

Steel can also be used as a fountainhead that feeds a disappearing fountain or infinity pool. To magnify the reflectivity of water we may also work the steel in with other forms made from glass, granite, or marble. This provides a more appropriate compliment to the multi-dimensional aspects of water and better feeds awareness with a stream of pure abstract consciousness that is selectively supported by the organic, yet strangely free from dependence on it and unique vibrant with an energy of its own.