Hello Reader,

One of my favorite garden shops is Fleur Detroit. It's a shop filled with wonderful lessons on how to design a cozy space.

You enter the courtyard through a gate. Once you cross the threshold, you feel like you've entered another world.

I wanted to understand the design principles that made this space feel so inspiring.

Since this was a retail space, it made sense to research the design principles used for visual merchandising.

The first thing I read about was enclosure.

Enclosure is how a tree canopy brings the sky down to human scale. Or how a threshold signals that you are entering a new space. Both of these can be used to create gardens.

The Idea of Enclosure

I want to tell you about Camillo Sitte. I discovered his work after my visit to Fleur Detroit and learned that he asked the same questions.

Sitte was an Austrian architect and painter. In 1889 he published a book called City Planning According to Artistic Principles (Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen). In the book he made an argument that urban planners are still using today.
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He walked through the medieval squares of Italy and Austria, stopping in each one, asking why some felt extraordinary and others felt empty. His answer was remarkably precise: the spaces that made people want to stay were the ones that enclosed them. These were the squares that felt like a room with walls, a ceiling of trees, and a threshold you crossed to enter the space. He called this 'enclosure'.

Sitte was specific about what enclosure meant. He proposed that the height surrounding a space should relate directly to its width. A ratio of one to one being the most intimate, and never exceeding two to one if the space was to feel human rather than monumental.

Get the ratio right and the space becomes a room. Get it wrong and the space becomes something you want to move through.

Sitte believed the perfect D/H (depth to height) ratio for a sense of coziness was 1:1 to 1:2. If the ratio exceeds 1:2, the space felt open.

He was writing about city squares. But this can also apply to garden rooms.

Applying Sitte's Principle

I'm applying Sitte's principle to my patio at Rabbit Run.

I am trying to create a cozy space on my patio that serves as an outdoor room. I want to have a sense of enclose. I can use Sitte's depth to height ratio to help me.

The most important design element on my Rabbit Run patio is a container-grown Japanese maple. The deep purple leaves match the color scheme of my container display and provide the needed middle canopy.

Imagine my surprise when I measured the patio depth compared to the height of the Japanese maple. The patio is roughly 19 feet deep. The maple is 12 feet tall, giving a perfect 1.58 D/H ratio.

Now I understand why the patio feels bleak without the maple.

What I'm Thinking About

What Sitte understood is that making a space feel cozy and welcoming isn't mysterious. It is a relationship between height and width that can be understood, designed, and made.

It turns out that comfort in a space is not a 'feeling'. It's a proportion. The relationship between height and enclosure that turns an open space into a room, and a room into somewhere worth staying.

Grow Update

In Field Notes No. 3, I shared a technique for propagating Rex begonias from leaf cuttings. I now see tiny leaves emerging from a few of the cuttings (see image below). So exciting!

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Sue