Old-School Design: Frame Your Garden View

When designing gardens and outdoor spaces, consider the frames you create with trees, perennials, and garden structures. Careful frame placement directs views to maximize your space's best features. It can be as easy as pruning and adding a flowering vine, or as complex as adding outdoor structures. Let's check out gardens using natural and manmade framing to create landscape art.

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This stone structure in Edith Wharton's gardens at The Mount gracefully frames a view from both sides. Plantings soften heavy walls.

Amy Renea: Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA, is arguably one of the world's most beautiful gardens — a masterpiece in framing. Everywhere you look: beautiful framed vignettes and vistas. My favorite framing spot: the arboretum. Gorgeous, ancient tree specimens collected by the Pearces abut directly onto the meadow. Bright sun and wildflowers in the meadow contrast deep arboretum shade. Trees pruned into graceful, natural-looking arcs framing fields beautifully.

Amy Renea: Arcs so well placed that many directly frame distant trees. Notice how this wide, squat-habit tree is framed with a subtle curve.

Slater Associates Landscape Architects: Using trees to create frames is excellent, but you can create literal frames with structures. This beautiful stone wall includes two cutout windows framing views and the garden in both directions for visitors on either side.

Kathleen Shaeffer Design, Exterior Spaces: If your home is modern, frame views with streamlined, geometric designs in stucco, concrete, and other materials. This doorway and window provide beautiful frames for horizontal planting lines.

Note the color blocking of gray and brown concrete reflecting green and gold color blocking of planting beyond.

Kathleen Shaeffer Design, Exterior Spaces: Another framed view in the same garden. A secondary doorway frames horizontals of green and deep aubergine in the meadow. Garden also offers framed views from seating area through wooden gridwork panels.

Amy Renea: In this more traditional garden, framing is created with a large iron trellis. Open on four sides, it creates framed views of various garden parts. This section frames a small vignette centered on the potting bench leading to the white trellis and pathway beyond.

Mark Dodge Design: Garden framing doesn't have to be exterior. Framing starts inside, with door and window placement. Notice how this doorway perfectly frames the path with a little green ceiling thanks to the neighboring tree. Additional views framed through small-paned windows.

Amy Renea: Do you have beautiful views that could benefit from framing? Wide open space outside your garden that would look beautiful framed within a rustic trellis? Perhaps prune a few trees to perfectly frame distant plantings.

Take time to look around your gardens carefully — be aware of natural framing that already exists, or create a few frames of your own.