Whether it’s winter or summer, what we see in our gardens can sometimes be complemented or enhanced by framing the view. You might have seen people who mount an empty old window frame in their gardens and the view through that border makes what we see have an importance that we otherwise wouldn’t notice. Perhaps you’ve seen movies where an artist takes his or her hands and uses fingers to make a square for framing a view. They are doing this to isolate part of the landscape in order to see it with new eyes. Gardeners can do this too.
There are many ways to frame a garden view. An empty door, window or picture frame can be hung from the limb of a tree, or mounted on timber supports in the ground. But framing doesn’t have to be this heavy or complicated, as this photo shows. I snapped this picture in Dave and Judy Rogers’ garden on Cape Cod a few years ago and it remains my best example of how simply someone might frame a view. Their construction was made of tall bamboo stakes and an old wreath frame…Judy was a master of repurposing “junk” into art.
Framing a garden view can have an added importance in the winter when the bare bones of the landscape can be enhanced by calling attention to how sculptural or dramatic things are in the garden. Go ahead… put your hands up and discover what you might “frame” in your garden, and then look around for what junk you might have to enclose and accent that view.
Thanks for the inspiration.
