Portfolio > Geometric climbing frames
A frequent problem with flower borders is the lack of structure to carry the garden through the winter, when the majority of perennials are dormant or confined to basal patches. A different approach to planting can resolve this - i.e. the integration of plants which retain their form through the winter with perennials. Another method is employed in the case of this garden, where I designed a group of three climbing frames which are adorned with Clematis varieties for summer flowering, but stand alone as sculptures during the winter. The frames are particularly useful in this case, because they provide scale (they stand slightly below the height of an average male) in a relatively narrow border. In my opinion, one of the most difficult elements to include in gardens is scale; the lack of which often results in a garden that is underwhelming for no readily discernible reason. I emphasise this point because I believe that it is normally one of the most important features in a successful design.
The germ of an idea for towers like this entered my mind when I visited the Dutch designer, Piet Oudolf's, garden in Hummelo in the Netherlands. In a small garden at the back of his nursery, he had thin ornamental steel frames through which climbers twined during summer. These simple frames were designed in such a way that they could stand as beautiful objects without the climbers, and in this way provided year-round scale in an intimate area. When I designed these climbing frames, I wanted to play with basic geometry, particularly with the proportions of the respective shapes within the towers. The module of the steel was taken off the existing wrought iron front fence, to be consistent.
The basic form is inspired by the elongated, vertically-reaching, geometry of certain work of the early-twentieth century Scottish architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. However, this is simplified to make sense in the context of a suburban Auckland garden. As a whole, they form a symmetrical set. The two outside frames have the same asymmetrical design (reversed to face each other), acting as sides to the symmetrically-designed central frame. The cast-iron balls on the top of the frames match a feature of the front fence of the property. All three are planted with one specimen each of the Clematis variety, 'Purpurea Plena Elegans', whilst two are planted with specimens of the heavily almond-scented Clematis variety, 'Rubromarginata' (syn. 'Triternata rubromarginata'), and the remaining Clematis is the relatively recently-bred variety, 'Rooguchi'.
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