Hello Reader,

There is a courtyard at Fleur Detroit that left its impression on me. I walked through an open gate — wrought iron, see-through, but unmistakably a threshold — and entered a different kind of space. A covered porch enclosed one side.

Trees rose from the courtyard floor, their canopy sitting just above the roof line, creating a ceiling that made the space feel like a cozy room. I didn't want to leave.

I wanted to understand the principles that made this space feel the way it did — so I could create something similar on my patio at Rabbit Run.

I went looking for answers in unexpected places. I found them in set design and visual merchandising — disciplines that have spent decades knowing how to make people feel the way I felt in that courtyard.

How enclosure creates comfort. How a canopy brings the sky down to a human scale. How a threshold — even a transparent one — signals that you're entering a space that has been composed with intention. The vocabulary was different. The principles were identical.

I had walked into a flower shop in Detroit and come out with a design language.

The Idea of Enclosure

I want to tell you about Camillo Sitte. When I discovered his work after my visit to Fleur Detroit, I recognized something immediately. He asked the same question a very long time ago.

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)— and in it he made an argument so simple and radical that urban planners are still arguing about it 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. The square that felt like a room with walls, a ceiling of trees, a threshold you crossed to enter. He called it 'enclosure'.

Sitte was precise 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 a crossing — something to move through rather than stay in.

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 he was also, without knowing it, writing about every garden that has ever made someone stop and linger.

Applying Sitte's Principle

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

The color scheme is rust and deep purple in terracotta pots — But the color is only part of what I'm designing. The other part is the enclosure itself. The middle canopy that brings the scale of the space down from the sky to something human. The boundary that signals you've entered somewhere composed with intention. The ratio that turns a patio into a room.

The most important design element on my Rabbit Run patio is a container-grown Japanese maple. The deep purple leaves will match the color scheme perfectly 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 — and what that courtyard in Detroit confirmed — is that the feeling of comfort in a space is not mysterious. It is not a matter of taste or luck or indefinable magic. It is a relationship between height and width that can be understood, designed, and made.

That knowledge changes everything about how you approach a space. Including a patio. Including, one day, a garden on a Kentucky hillside.

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!

Thanks for being here.
Sue