Quiet Garden Retreats
Planting trees and shrubs is an excellent way to create an inviting personal garden retreat or refuge, and to silence noise from reaching your home and yard.
Personal Garden Refuges
Create personal and inviting garden retreats through imaginative use of trees and shrubs. Uses of a retreat may vary from person to person and from season to season, but all are similar with respect to plantings. Every retreat or refuge uses the basic concepts to achieve pleasing results.
Think first of what type of retreat you want and how you plan to use it.
You may want to have a giardino segreto—Italian for “secret garden”—for children’s play. Perhaps you want to discover the delights of nature, wildlife, and birds in your own yard.
You might desire a sheltered place to spread a blanket and enjoy a picnic lunch. Perhaps you dream of a quiet sitting area where you can sit alone to quietly read a book, or to re-create a special place from memories of childhood.
An ideal retreat may be lushly planted but loosely structured or—as for an Oriental meditation garden—formal, restrained, and subtle in its use of shrubs and trees.
Almost by definition, retreats are enclosed for privacy. Plant their surrounding hedges or create living fences with climbing vines. Think in terms of floors of turf or low-growing herbs, walls of shrubbery, and ceilings of tree canopies.
Depending on your site, you may want the hedge or fence to be dense and impenetrable to ensure complete privacy. A more open planting gives definition to the space without blocking pleasant breezes. Overhead canopies of arching tree limbs lend intimacy to a retreat, and they offer shade and shelter underneath.
Furnishings include chairs, benches, or swings for your hideaway. Add a water feature or a fountain to gurgle with the cool splash of bubbling water, or a quiet reflection pool. Water pulls the sky down into the retreat and fills your senses of sight, sound, and touch, while adding a sense of tranquillity.
Muffling Sound with Foliage
When a nearby street adds traffic noise to your garden, plant sound-softening trees and shrubs along that boundary.
Remember that broad-leaved evergreens with large cup-shaped leaves block noise more effectively than do needle-leaved conifers or deciduous species.
The hedge should be as close to the sound source as possible. Gaps of empty air space between the trees and shrubs increase the plantings’ ability to muffle sound.