In the Landscape: What Type of Backdrop is Your Home?

Ca. 1986, I gave myself, English Cottage Gardens, by Ethne Clarke & Clay Perry, below, for my birthday.  Hungry to learn 'everything' about designing gardens, I didn't learn 'more' about designing a garden.  Instead I learned what had the most impact in a garden.  Your house.
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Your home is the backdrop to your garden, and its main focal point.
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Until this epiphany, I gave house exteriors little to no consideration.
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Compare a common USA home to homes in English Cottage Gardens?  Not happening.
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Use a clear eye, aka honesty/integrity, not an easy lipstick-on-a-pig thought process.  Love your home into being a beautiful backdrop to your garden.  Because it is more, it is the backdrop to your life.
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Living in my starter home, ca. 1986, for less than a year, it was an incredible interior, to me, yet depressing exterior.  It gets worse.  Coming home after a weekend away, sometimes I would cry before walking inside my home.  Real tears.  Frustration at living in such an ugly house with a stupid landscape.  No money to change anything.  Poor me.  This is the exact situation teaching me there was much I could change.  As a little girl it was rather common to hear, Tara-the-Terror.  Delicious, she woke up.  My garden, and house, knew, 'game on'.
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Elements of the house, as backdrop to your garden, you must consider.  Views into your home, types of window treatments, interior lighting, no exposed views of the backside of a tv-sofa-pictures-etc, paint color, make the patio/deck a destination of comfort/beauty, need shutters, light fixtures outside, types of hardware on the front door, door mats, cable box/airconditioners, underside of a deck, views into the neighbors garage/RV, paths from the house into the garden, scale of plantings to scale of house, flow around the house, how does the house look from the curb, what do I see walking to your front door, what do I see walking out your front door, and any other tidbit, no matter how minute, fluff it up, regardless of your bank account.  You have a brain.  Use your IQ, figure it out.      
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I sourced exterior furniture, focal points, stone/brick, at garage sales, vacant lots (with permission), trash day gleanings, thrift stores, paint was from the returned paint section of the hardware store.  Plants came from sources in the Extension Service Market Bulletin, or the local nursery's plant-of-the-week, 97 cents, sometimes, $1.99. Mostly it was my own labor, and inner vision of what I had to have in my garden to breath to survive.  Patience, ick, had to be an element too.
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Years later, reading Karl Jung, "Our lives are about getting the outside to match the inside."  I did understand.
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Decades later this passion for a beautiful garden, and home, has not lessened, instead, increased, and still learning.  When garden epiphanies arrive now, they make me laugh.  Nothing is hard about creating a garden, instead it is the pealing away of ego.  Realizing the brain is obtuse to all a beautiful garden freely gives.
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Read, English Cottage Gardens, with your 'eye' analyzing house-as-backdrop.



Good backdrop, below, Sharon Santoni's home in France.



Copy, is a huge tool in garden design.  Sharon's garden is a good example of be-careful-what-you-copy.  If you live in a 60's ranch, or 80's cluster home, as I did, this is not a garden for you to copy.  Why?  You don't have her backdrop to carry the weight of down time in her potager.  Come winter, what will you have?  Bleak.
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This situation, winter's bleak garden, creates another garden design tool.  Design your garden for winter, not only the ease of spring.  A garden beautiful in winter, will be beautiful in spring.
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Still want to have Sharon's garden in your 80's cluster home?  I did.  I addressed all of the 'house' issues listed above, and added evergreens to structure my garden throughout winter's bleak.  Done.
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Simple fix to have this potager, below, in front of your 60's brick ranch.  Add evergreen structure within the potager


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In comes that robber/foe/obtuseness of your labors/money/brain waves, you see the answers, you read the answers, yet don't execute.
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No worries, it's human nature, I did it at the front end too.
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In my new home/garden 2 months, it's the phase of patience.  Paying attention to sun/shade, drainage, flow, privacy, views, parking, destinations & etc.  Knowing, and letting, house renovations have their pace.  The urge to garden here is fierce, a foe at present, especially in the micro details.  Instead, Tara the Terror is vanquishing the foe with patience.  Stinks being mature about this.
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TtT is attacking another foe, having-too-much, and planning for a historic American farmhouse garden, deer proof, drought tolerant, little maintenance, productive in beauty/repose, and agriculturally with 'just-enough' fruit, berries, herbs, vegetables.  This doesn't mean, in the least, I don't want to work in my garden.  Working in a garden is a privilege of being on Earth.  Metaphor of washing-the-servants-feet, and with a free/happy heart.  The best parts of my life have come from this relationship.
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Garden & Be Well,  XO T
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Top pic from Amazon, order if you don't have it, bottom pics Sharon Santoni.