The Gardener In January: A Blueprint For Green Dreams

January might be the most important month in the garden calendar; it is the time when we can stop fussing and start thinking.

Perhaps you have just moved to a place where the garden is nonexistent or old and tired, and in either case needs a fresh start. Perhaps you have a part of the yard that needs redoing, or you are simply pondering how you set about crafting a garden.

From the safe tether of a soft chair, you can soar to the heady heights of landscape design, which is the most important but least considered aspect of garden-making.

Plants bring life, sculpture, texture, color and more to the garden, but they need a framework. I've known plant geeks whose entire yards are random collections of favored flora. They are places that are wholly enthralling to their creators, but to no one else.

Every garden needs a coherent structure. Design is pragmatic it creates safe steps instead of muddy slopes but it also drives scale, sets the mood and establishes a spirit of the place.

In the 1960s, Geoffrey Jellicoe, a giant of 20th-century landscape architecture, wrote a book with his wife, Susan, that described the two essential elements as "form" and "content."

Form "is the disposition of space," they wrote in "Modern Private Gardens." The photos in the book, of mid-century modern houses and gardens, are in black and white and not particularly flattering, but they reveal a real paucity of plantings that, to my eye, actually deflates the central argument. There is too much form and not enough content.

Since the 1960s, we have enjoyed a horticultural revolution; far more ornamental plants are at hand along with an accepted need to use them in more natural ways. But this surfeit requires a keener sense of restraint to avoid a formless jumble.

Jellicoe, for a while, had formed a design partnership with another great modernist, Russell Page. Whenever I want to be recharged, I read Page's classic "The Education of a Gardener" for his masterful insights and his gift of taking visual concepts and putting them into words.

Page's fundamental approach to garden design was forged when, as an art student, he was told: "Know what it is you want to say, then try and express it as simply as you can."

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The Gardener In January: A Blueprint For Green Dreams