Landscape architect Matthew Cunningham won a 2016 Gold Award in the Small Gardens category from APLD. This Boston garden is on Beacon Hill, in one of the city's most affluent neighborhoods, and it's just steps from the Massachusetts State House. The four story brick mansion has an L-shaped flat garden that's just 775 square feet.
Cunningham designed a minimalist garden to meet the clients' appreciation for modern art and their desire for a low maintenance landscape. He aimed to balance hard and soft, new and old, in order to create a soothing, tranquil space.
The highlight of the design is a contemporary stainless steel fountain that blocks urban clatter with the sound of water. A brick wall topped with steel echoes patterns on the house, and linear bands of granite were laid in an alternating pattern of different widths. Mosses fill the voids.
The garden is used year-round, so plantings were selected with that in mind. Amelanchier trees, Ilex and Fothergilla are main features of the simple planting palette, along with groundcover Liriope and custom-made planters.
As Cunningham puts it, "This project reinforces the fact that even the smallest spaces can become powerful and meaningful landscapes — and that you never know what treasures lie on the opposite side of historic garden walls."
Leave a Reply