Small garden 'rooms' offer variety of pleasures
Now’s the perfect time for dreaming about your spring and summer garden. Gather up your seed and garden catalogs, take some notes, visit a garden center, let your imagination loose and put a plan on paper.
Choosing one style, though, can be difficult. Do you want a formal garden, a cottage garden, perhaps herbs mixed in with vegetables and flowers? Will you grow only culinary herbs, or a combination of culinary, aromatic and decorative?
Well, why not a little of them all?
Consider planting a number of smaller, themed gardens. I did that at my home in Maine, and came to see each one as a room:
There was a beautiful knot bench in the tea garden where I grew chamomile, lemon thyme, sage, yarrow, lemon balm, roses, calendula, bee balm, mint, lemon verbena and several scented geraniums. The bees loved this garden, and it was a great stress-reliever to sit on the bench in the warm sun and listen to the buzz of their activity, inhale the fragrances, and enjoy the garden’s peace and beauty. In the middle of winter, it was possible to sit and recall the warmer days of summer; the bee balm seed heads were as fragrant then as in midsummer, and you had only to crush one to be taken back.
