Small Modern Garden

The benefit of a small modern garden is you put one virtually anywhere on the landscape as an accent to architectural forms or to create a small, special environment dedicated to a special purpose. Space is never an issue with these forms because they are built to scale with smaller scaled items. Smaller stones and center profile materials are employed to create the illusion that there is actually more room within the garden than there actually is.

Small modern gardens are found everywhere around townhomes, schools, and commercial environments. We see this a great deal in office parks where buildings are crowded together and there is very little open space available for break areas. Property managers will hire us to build atriums and courtyards in the corner areas that form between the exterior of a building and the adjoining sidewalk.

Many atriums will have a custom fountain in the center of converging radii decorated that is decorated with a layer of dark gravel. Lights are installed in the fountain to add beauty to the grounds at night, and vegetation is used to round out corners and line the exterior wall of the building. Vegetation here is also utilized as a compliment the geometric structure of the building with a focused living presence that actually provides a very realistic reflection of the professional mindset of the business cycle.

In school yards and community colleges we often will build small modern gardens as entry gardens. Entry gardens are ideal transitional spaces that help move the mind from the hard interior structures of the school building itself into the more open campus areas intended for recreation and relaxation. Entry gardens can also be built on the sides of school buildings to provide transitional movement away from parking areas.

Larger campuses and office parks typically want more than one small modern garden. In many of these settings, we are working between multiple buildings that are connected by sidewalks, patios, and even parking lots. There are plenty of opportunities for gardens in all of these places. Linear gardens can be planted along the length of the sidewalk. Sections can be removed from patios, and the resulting space can be landscaped and planted accordingly.

In the more open, roomy spaces, courtyards can be built that feature complex geometric hardscape designs, strategic and minimalist plantings of vegetation, and trees in the center of converging radii. As we do in all modern gardens, we use very dark colored shrubs, ground cover, and grasses to provide complimentary organic accent to rock, concrete, and gravel formations.

In townhomes where space is limited, we may build two small modern gardens in the front of the dwelling, one on either corner of the yard. We can either build these within the driveway area itself (in the case of a motor court), or we may utilize empty space between the arc of a small circle drive and the exterior of the house. One very popular design is to develop these areas as gravel patios with a single tree planted in the center.