The Great Outdoors

This Brooklyn Backyard Channels France’s Greatest Gardens

The manicured space blends classical parterre design with modern simplicity for a low-maintenance retreat
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It can be a challenge to find respite and peace in any urban environment, but imagine trying to create a place of reprieve and greenery in the heart of bustling Brooklyn. That’s exactly what garden designer Susan Welti of Foras Studio was tasked with at a home in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood, where she was subtly inspired by her surroundings and its gridded plan to create a parterre design—a traditional garden consisting of crisp, almost severe flower beds divided by connecting paths (think: grand French gardens, such as those at Versailles).

The Gardens of Eden features imaginative residential garden ideas from around the world.

The garden, at about 800 square feet, mixes manicured plantings in flower boxes with ones that are kept more natural and organic. Featured in The Gardens of Eden (Gestalten, $60), a new publication by Abbye Churchill, the project so expertly balances formal and informal, intentional and organic, that we’ve pulled together a few takeaways from its design below.

“A mix of grasses and spherical topiary boxwood creates a high-contrast, sculptural feel for the garden,” notes Abbye.

Mix contemporary with classical

Landscape designers such as Claude Mollet pioneered parterre gardens in France in the 1600s, but Susan sought to take the traditional rectilinear design and give it a contemporary, minimalist feel. “While feeling formal at first blush, there is a certain wildness to the parterre form, too,” writes Abbye.

“The gridded design was a nod to the clients’ use of grids inside the house, and to their appreciation of strong graphic imagery,” Susan told Abbye of the initial concept.

Go for graphic

Plants are, of course, innately organic, so when they are contrasted with starkly contemporary shapes, the feel quickly goes from rustic nature to curated design. “A bluestone stepping-stone path is accompanied by a long Taxus hedge to create a strong, graphic line and to complement the topiary work in the boxwood spheres,” explains Abbye.

“The use of boxwood in the garden lends itself to sculptural expression; almost any shape can be created over time and with pruning.”

Keep it low-maintenance

Susan specifically wanted to create a low-maintenance garden for her clients with plants that wouldn’t create a heavy demand on water supply or irrigation. “The parterre beds were filled with green velvet boxwood, Mexican feathergrass (Nassella tenuissima), Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia, ‘Little Spire’), hydrangea, and Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum odoratum, ‘Variegatum’),” writes Abbye. Plus, “thanks to the gravel paving, drainage occurs without runoff.”

“The garden is hand-watered biweekly from March to November,” Abbye writes. “After the harsh New York winter, maintenance season begins in the spring with pruning the roses and shaping the boxwoods and Taxus.”

Create areas of shade and sunlight

Susan says that the grid was “a good way to experiment with sun-loving plants” because of the even distribution of light. But she also created an area toward the rear of the garden where there was a less regulated shady area at the rear of the garden that incorporated some of the same plants as in the parterre beds. “The use of the same plants both in and out of the parterre beds is exciting,” says Abbye. “We simultaneously see them grow as both manicured and wild, as both kept and natural.”