I thought it was so simple. We’d plop a round fountain in the center of our patio and feel like we were in Rome. Then I had lunch with Laura Lynne Dyer. Laura Lynne just happens to be a landscape designer, so I casually asked her where one shops for fountains. Her head tilted, and she listened for a minute to my babbling.
“The thing about a central focus is, it breaks up your seating,” she remarked. “You find you now have sides, or areas. Which can be fine, if your space is big enough. The trick with a fountain, though, is seasonality; it’s shut off for five months a year. So if it’s dead center, you’re detouring around this covered blob all winter, as you cross from the house to the garage.”
Mmm. That doesn’t happen in Rome.
“I’ve designed this cover in my head that’s like an artificial tree, with pine needles in looped rings,” she confides. “You could even decorate it for the holidays! I swear, one of these days I’m going to find a manufacturer for it. It came to me because I was thinking, ‘How do you make something disappear naturally? You put a tree there.”
I was already imagining it covered in popcorn and berry garland for the birds. But she was still brainstorming. “Walk the space, and watch each other. The tricky thing is scale,” she said. “If you have a large space, your fountain has to be proportioned for that.”
I gulped, thinking of money. “Align your budget with what’s most important,” she suggested. “If you’re going to change something around in a few years, get it at Wal-Mart. But if your eye is going to land on something every day of every year for the forseeable future, it’s worth a huge chunk of your budget.
“Of course, there are also ways to make it feel larger, by raising it or surrounding it with flowers,” she added. “And don’t forget the splash factor; if you’re sitting right next to it, you’re going to get splashed, but you can regulate that by getting a different pump.” It was 98 with a heat index of 120. Splashes sounded just fine.
“A fountain’s great for the birds,” she continued. “But you can have algae issues, to you can put just a little tiny bit of bleach in it.” And how do I stop the dog from drinking out of it? She smiled. “You let the dog drink out of it. I’m talking just a drop of bleach every once in a while; it will diffuse in the water.” Then she frowned. “How level is your patio?” I thought guiltily of the two lumpy seams of concrete that intersected in the middle, leaving one quadrant sunken. Hadn’t factored that in. “You can shim it,” she assured me. “Or build a frame base out of stone, or build a stone border and put sand in it to create a base.
“You really need some color, too, if you’ve got all that concrete,” she continued. “And privacy on the open end of the patio—maybe a hedge of boxwood or hollies? Nothing too oppressive—there’s a delicate balance between cozy and claustrophobic.”
By the time we finished lunch, I’d described the entire patio, including my prized little clay pots of herbs along the wall of the house. “That could be an amateur announcement,” she warned with a grin. “If you design a space yourself, there are certain things you can do—I’m actually working on a book about this—that immediately announce you’re an amateur. Lots of tiny little pots is one of them; try a few big planters, or a raised bed. Small stepping stones are another amateur announcement; if they’re big enough that it takes you and your husband to carry them, it’ll look like a pro did the job. And if you do a path from the patio into the garden, use a larger flagstone at every point of transition: anywhere you land or begin or change direction. That allows your body to readjust.”
By the end of lunch, I was more interested in getting my mind to readjust. Plopping down a fountain wasn’t as simple as it looked. The subtleties intrigued me--and the timidity of my own thinking annoyed me. That cliché about “thinking big” was true; I hadn’t dared, not with my little flower pots or the little round stepping stones or the fountain itself. I'd been tinkering, ever so tentatively, around the edges, but not envisioning any changes dramatic enough to make a compelling difference.
Yikes. If I can't have fun in my own back yard, where can I?
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
