Outdoor Raised Trough Gardens And Raised Flowerbeds
Very helpful information comes from the writings of Anne Ashberry, who began building miniature gardens for flat-dwellers and for disabled people but then found that these mini-worlds were popular with everyone.
She drew up lists of plants which resemble miniature versions of ordinary trees and flowers and thus help miniature gardens to look like the real thing. Often these mini-plants come from high mountain areas, where small size suits bright sunshine and poor, well-drained soil. They are called ‘Alpines’. If you want to use them, your miniature garden needs to be in a sunny, well-drained place - never under a tree.
Anne Ashberry also made some miniature gardens with formal architectural features, like geometric pools, archways, pavilions, pergolas, paths and so on. Her photos and measurements of her formal mini-gardens in troughs show the size probably necessary for Islamic-style gardens in miniature, if on the same scale as Alpine mini-trees.
Perhaps the most important thing is to produce a plan which really could be fulfilled in the space available. Your design needs to specify the precise internal dimensions of your miniature garden.
Raised Trough Gardens
Different sorts of trough garden
Trough gardens began with gardeners using old stone water troughs from farms, which they filled with soil and plants.
But real stone troughs are rare, so next people used old porcelain sinks which they covered with a mix of cement, sand and peat, called ‘hypertufa’, to make them look like stone troughs.
Next, some gardeners covered large polystyrene or plastic boxes or washing-up bowls with ‘hypertufa’ to make imitation stone troughs. This is cheaper, less heavy, and gives more choice of size.
Other gardeners cast ‘hypertufa’ troughs from home-made moulds, so they could obtain whatever size they wanted.
Some gardeners don’t bother about imitating a stone trough and just use plain porcelain sinks or plastic plant trays.
For a trough garden, you need to choose one of the above methods.
You might have to build your own trough to get one with a large enough area.
For Anne Ashberry’s trough gardens with miniature pools, paths and pavilions, typical areas
were:
122cm x 92cm, 122cm x 61cm, and 92cm x 61cm.
(The depth for all her garden troughs is shallow: only 10 – 15cm.)
Her smallest formal trough garden is 92 cm x 46 cm, which from a photo looks possibly big enough only for Plan 4 in ‘Different ways of making a Chahar Bagh garden’. For anything more than this, you need to think towards the top of the size range mentioned.
Should you go bigger still? Anne Ashberry’s biggest trough was 180cm x 90cm and, using reinforcing rods, you could go bigger still. But for larger troughs, the case grows for a raised flowerbed instead. The larger a trough, the more you will be set back by any major mistake during construction. Also, it may get too heavy to move.
Don’t forget that your trough must be raised to the height 20cm – 50cm, so people can see it properly! (Brick, stone, large logs, ornamental old chimneys can make pillars for raising trough gardens.)
Molding your own trough
For a large shallow trough, you may need to cast it yourself, if you can’t find a big enough box or sink to cover with hypertufa. Through making a mould from earth, a heap of sand, or using a rod and wire framework you can get the size of your choice. If you search on the internet for ‘hypertufa’, you will find many recipes for making these troughs because so many people make them. Casting a trough can, in fact, be done much more easily than some of these recipes suggest. At design stage, you don’t need to know how you will do it. But you do need space for messy, wet shovelling of sand and cement, to expect to cut reinforcing rods, and to be prepared to try twice.
Casting your own trough, also makes possible an especially small miniature garden, if you choose. As mentioned, this may not fit the scale of Alpine mini-trees. But, using other plants, it could still be beautiful. It might suit indoors.
Alternatively you can design a trough garden to fit a container which you obtain at planning stage. 75cm x 40cm is quite large for an old sink. 50cm x 40cm is more typical. It must have at least one drainage hole – if need be, you must make holes.
Alternatively you could choose a raised flowerbed.
Minature Garden In A Raised Flower Bed
What size?
A suitable raised flowerbed might be 150cm x 250cm, for instance, and perhaps 4 – 6 courses of bricks in height. It could be either bigger or smaller than this. But its size should be such that, once completed, you can reach any part for maintenance tasks without standing on the miniature garden itself.
As well as offering a larger area, a raised flowerbed could provide a miniature garden with large drops between terraces, like some Mughal gardens in Kashmir, which make waterfalls possible. There should be more opportunity for complex water features and it may be easier to hide pipes, tubes or pumps.
Things to think about
A raised flowerbed may present more challenges about weed control and drainage than a trough garden. If you are using Alpine mini-plants, you need a layer of compost with added grit for drainage. Unlike a trough, in a raised flowerbed, you need to stop weeds coming through this layer if there is just ordinary soil below. You need to think who would do the general weeding, which would be needed in the long term.
Low brick walls are an obvious way to create a raised flowerbed. You would need to think who would do this. Such simple bricklaying can be done by novices following instructions carefully and receiving a little supervision from an experienced person. It is only when height, neatness or speed is needed that amateurs should steer clear of bricklaying.
If you’re doing bricklaying, could you use any of the ornamental brick patterns which are common in Islamic architecture in Central Asia? Or any other ornament to the base of the flowerbed which would suit the subject? While it wouldn’t be necessary, it is an opportunity to enhance the project.