We are a Toronto based full service landscaping, garden design and installation company with our own planting, stonework and woodwork crews, with a unique focus on quality of design, and integration of inside and outside living space.
If you are outside the Greater Toronto Area, please visit our online garden design site at www.earthcitylandscapes.com.
|
By Clive Russell, OAA
Inside and Out Garden Design
Roam
With the layout of military camps that later grew into towns and cities, the Romans started a process we now take for granted- the dividing up of urban spaces into rectangular plots. Rectangles are very efficient, easy to record in deeds of ownership, easy to subdivide and fence, and the straight streets that front them are great for getting around quickly, the addressing is logical, and so on. And rectangles (boxes) are easy to build. So here we are, in the box of our house, within the box of our property, somewhere in one of the rows of other boxes. But when we step out the door into our garden, most of us want to get out of the box and into nature- some version or reminder of nature, at least. Our minds, our spirits, our souls need that- softness, complexity, mystery, indeterminacy, free from boundaries and definition. Freedom to roam. Space.
Continue reading Get Out Of The Box | Your Garden and the World
by Clive Russell
Inside and Out Garden Design
Many city garages are nothing more than inefficient, mouldering storage bins for old lawn chairs, cardboard boxes of who knows what, and unreachable, rarely if ever used whatevers. In the small lots of the central city they are often the defining element, occupying up to a quarter of the useable space, and warping the rest of it into a less than ideal L-shape. While Toronto land prices haven’t yet reached the hot air balloon levels of Tokyo, San Francisco or New York, these creaking backyard remnants of a Tin Lizzie yesteryear do take up scarce and valuable space, shade the remainder into slugville, and cut many a garden design off at the knees.
Continue reading Converting Your Garage into a Teahouse
By Sheree Rasmussen, AOCA
Inside and Out Garden Design
One of the challenges facing urban dwellers today is creating a sense of privacy and enclosure in outdoor spaces without feeling closed in and without offending neighbors. After a hard day out there in the urban chaos we often need to relax, rejuvenate and not have to relate to anyone. The days of complete openness, with just a waist high chain link fence between properties, is gone for good or bad, with most often a 2 metre high pressure treated cookie cutter wood barrier in its place. But there are other solutions than the wooden playpen- ways to feel secluded but not cut off.
Continue reading Creating Privacy in the Garden
by Sheree Rasmussen
Inside and Out Garden Design
One of the drawbacks of living in the sky is the lack of contact with the good green earth. In condo and apartment buildings, outdoor space is often the last thing to be considered. Even with all the renovating going on, the balcony is often left as the building code minimum concrete box with cage-like railings. “Naturalizing” it can soften your environment, create an extension of your living space and acting as a buffer from the churning city below. Whether you have 20 square feet of concrete slab or a large wrap around deck, there’s a lot you can do to improve it.
Continue reading Making the Most of Your Balcony
By Clive Russell, OAA
Inside and Out Garden Design
Garden design in the Western world has been enriched by successive waves of influence from the east. For more than fifty years, Japanese garden design had an enormous impact on how we see our outdoor spaces, and more recently Chinese Feng Shui has begun to affect garden arrangements and relationship to the house and its surroundings. Although one would not think of the snow swept ridges of the Himalayas as a place to learn about gardens, an extremely useful way of relating to garden design has now come to us from that region. Known in the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition as The Five Buddha Families, and less literally translated as the Five Wisdoms, it offers a way of organizing and understanding the complex of aesthetic, cultural and practical issues surrounding any design problem.
Continue reading The Five Wisdoms of Garden Design
|
