The commitment to a new direction sent me scuttling for my landscape design books and Google, which found me a site called Soul of the Garden, where Tom Spencer, a gardener from Texas, says: "People often assume that formal gardens are more difficult to create than those that try to replicate natural settings, but I have found the opposite to be true. Wildscapes are hard to pull off, and most end up looking a whole lot more wild than their creators intended. I admire totally naturalistic and native plantings, but they don't feel like gardens to me so much as landscape restorations.
"It doesn't matter whether you have your heart set on a wildflower meadow or a jungle, weaving some formal elements into your landscape will make it feel more inviting and will certainly make it easier to maintain and use."
He refers to Texas landscape designer James David, who says he starts with classical designs and then "destroys' them with loose, informal plantings.
Perfect. James David is my new best friend and this charming comment provided immediate inspiration for the first step in "formalising" our garden.
Classical design implies an order based on geometry and using some of the same tricks employed by Renaissance artists, including perspective, symmetry, and repetition of forms, colours and themes.
But it's perfectly fine to bend those rules to marry two different styles.
For example, to tame the paddock (the Southern Man would certainly not call it a lawn) in front of our house we've marked out a 15m by 26m block that lies beyond our almost formal terrace, and bordered it with a double row of railway sleepers. For the same money we could just about have gone to Italy and found some real formal gardens to copy, but this simple if costly step has done exactly what we hoped. The straightforward act of containing the area in a geometric design has given the kikuyu a raison d'etre, and without any other interference it suddenly looks like a lawn. On the other hand, the rustic, falling-apart railway sleepers act as an anchor to the wider, feral landscape.
Behind the sleepers we'll plant a bank of shrubs to create a transitional space between the formal lawn (croquet, anyone?) and the mess of shrubs and trees behind.
That probably would have done it for me but the Southern Man has thrown a spanner in the works by requiring other formal elements, such as an Italianate pond and, good grief, some topiary. Once I'd have thought no, absolutely no topiary, not in this messy subtropical landscape, but in the past few months I've seen quite a few examples of using topiary in a casual landscape design, and I have to admit it looks quirky, funny, interesting and charming.
As Spencer says: "The hand of man is revealed, not hidden, in most successful gardens. It is fun to experience the personality of the gardener when strolling down the paths of his or her garden."
It will be fun finding native plants that lend themselves to topiarising - some of the small-foliage pittosporums will surely co-operate - and I'll enjoy the easy but absorbing job of clipping them into possum shapes just to reassure my friends I've not completely lost the plot.
