A Harder Task: Man-Made Garden Features For An Islamic Garden In Britain
Rather more than the plants, it’s the lay-out and man-made garden features which give an Islamic garden its character.
A particular challenge is that British garden centres rarely stock fountains, ‘cast-stone’ pools, path edgings etc which suit an Islamic garden. Much of what is on sale has been designed for Italian-style gardens.
At design stage, you do not have to solve every practical problem in advance. But you do need at least to reflect on where the things you are designing might come from.
One way of obtaining suitable items for an Islamic garden is to hire a craftsman to make them or to get imports from Islamic countries. This might be very expensive. Still, it is worth searching on the internet for such items. Be sure to include ‘Moroccan’ and ‘Moorish’ in your search terms because, in Britain, Morocco has become something of a brand-name for Islamic-style garden features. There are specialist firms which import some suitable garden features.
The other way is to think about what you could make yourselves. You do not necessarily need expensive items made by other people.
Possible Solutions
For geometric flowerbeds, edgings can be made with tiles or tiles covered in render.
You could create attractive traditional patterns in pathways, using ordinary tiles, concrete paving setts or bricks. While Islamic decoration sometimes uses costly decorated tiles, sometimes it skilfully creates patterns just from a mixture of plain tiles or bricks in different sizes and colours. It is worth studying photos of Islamic architecture for patterns which thus could be created with your local materials. Some of the pavement designs at the Generalife could be easily copied.
Another Islamic pattern-making technique, from Central Asia, is to selectively colour lines of mortar between plain bricks so as to create a geometric pattern. Often it’s done in blue. Sometimes strips of blue tile are embedded in the mortar. On existing brick walls, maybe colourful geometric patterns could be produced by partially repointing them in this way.
It is perfectly possible to copy simple methods for making star-shaped trellis patterns, which are used throughout the Islamic world. A V-shaped nick is sawn into each side of the squares in narrowly spaced trellis laths. A large eight-pointed star panel in a trellis can be made easily by trimming down broader pieces of wood - a Moroccan method. Think creatively about trellis designs.
An octagonal pool could be constructed, using an ordinary pool liner and, for edgings, ‘cast-stone’ slabs from an ordinary builders’ merchant. It might take more planning and effort than an ordinary pool. But it need not cost more.
There are techniques for making homemade ‘cast-stone’ slabs with the shapes and carved patterns of your choice. This could make possible homemade fountains, waterfalls or ‘chini-khanas’, which could be cast in sections. Around 50 cm square is a comfortable upper limit for castings using this method. Such methods are slow and require substantial time from an adult, but not costly equipment or materials. Only plaster, cement, sand, mould-making rubber, and a saucepan are needed. Home-made mosaic can produce colourful effects similar to tiling.
You may not be able to emulate the detailed paintings which adorn arches or pavilions in some Islamic gardens. But you can colour-photocopy them from books or print them out from the internet. They could then be decoupaged on to wood, given suitable borders and covered in outdoors-quality varnish, like yacht varnish.
It is worth thinking creatively about ways of achieving the sort of garden features which you would like for your garden.
Your design needs to be neither too ambitious nor too unambitious.