Old House Gardens

With historic houses, the key to front garden design is letting the house speak for itself. Often you'll find old houses buried behind large, overgrown plantings, completely hiding their nature. Foundation plantings for historic structures should include, as here, appropriately sized and scaled plant material that will never grow to obscure the structure. Color is important too: a soft muted palette, selected to match the house colors, serves to link house and landscape together. As one Victorian landscape manual put it: "If you are proud of your house, pray, let it be seen!"